Ruby Blondell’s Helen of Troy is that rare work of scholarship that is both extremely accessible and intellectually uncompromising. Its format is designed for a general audience: footnotes are kept to a minimum, Greek texts are not printed, and references are found in short bibliographical notes in the back of the book. The result is a text that erects few barriers to the uninitiated at the cost of occasionally frustrating the scholar. That said, Blondell takes no shortcuts in her readings of the Greek texts, avoiding facile interpretations at every turn. Just when the reader thinks that there can be nothing more to be said, she turns the tables, showing how the manifest content of a text is undermined by what it leaves out. This is critical to the success of the enterprise, which considers in chronological order an array of ancient texts featuring Helen, some of which—in less expert hands—might start to blend into one another. Under Blondell’s microscope, each text in turn yields up its strategies and implicit ideologies while at the same time revealing its differences from the earlier versions of Helen to which it responds.