Alright, let’s take a look at chapter two.
Odysseus and Achilles are clearly meant to be bantering/flirting and I just don’t think it’s particularly interesting
“Pyrrha,” Odysseus said warmly, “you look like a meteor. I saw one last week from my ship: a fiery comet with a tail like your red hair that trailed halfway across the sky. It was beautiful and deadly, like so many women.”
“Is this flirtation?” Achilles murmured. “It won’t work.”
“I am old enough to be your very youthful father,” Odysseus said blandly, sipping from his cup.
“Possibly my son,” Achilles countered softly.
Odyseus gasped, then roared with laughter
While I do fully endorse the art of using dialogue to create an atmosphere and sense of setting, this kind of comes across as “nobody talks like this” rather than as “people from a different time talking to each other.” The opening line about how Achilles looks like a meteor is particularly bad, especially since Odysseus is meant to be a smoother talker.
with a double fold of fat-wrapped meat, the food of gods as well as kings, spiced with nettle smoke and rosemary and charred pomegranates and salted with dried seafoam.
I just had to include this bc of the nettle smoke and dried sea foam???? Sea foam??? Just say sea salt. (Also the fat wrapped meat is likely a reference to one of the stories involving Prometheus helping out mankind by tricking the gods into choosing fat covered (and less desirable) meat as their offerings from mortals. Neat.)
As they began to eat it, Odysseus said, “So you’re from the mainland.”
“The mainland has nothing for me but tears.”
“The mainland has nothing for anyone but tears. Diomedes would disagree, but he is the reason for half the tears.”
Seriously, who talks like this? It comes across as disjointed and awkward, like the author doesn’t get the rhythms of normal conversation, rather than old-fashioned and poetic.
I know there was a siege or two near Thebai,” Achilles said. “I assume
he is a famous warrior. But I am more interested in peace than war. War seems like a wonderful way to make everyone poor and miserable, to increase the share of orphans, to promote superstitions, to waste a lot of good bronze that could be used for tools, to ruin the soil, to kill perfectly good cart-horses pulling chariots, and so on.” Father had given the same speech once word for word, when she told him she wanted to grow up to be a great warrior and kill a million people. Despite everything, the wisdom of the speech had stayed with her.
“Undoubtedly war is waste and carnage,” Odysseus agreed. “It is only wise if it serves some noble end or provides unusual profit—a city without walls is begging to be plundered, for instance—”
“I am familiar with piracy.”
Kind of wild of someone meant to be Achilles saying this about war, even if it was supposedly a response Peleus gave to tamp down his enthusiasm for war. I can see a version of Odysseus saying this, considering he was never that excited about the Trojan War to begin with, but it’s wild for Achilles since the whole way Odysseus catches him out in the myths is by presenting girly things and weapons to the women of Scyros and Achilles is the only one who goes nuts for the weapons. And Achilles’ whole deal is that he chooses a short life and everlasting fame instead of a long and peaceful one of obscurity. Like. That’s his whole deal. It only choater two, he could get really war hungry any moment now, I guess.
“International gift-giving?” Achilles said drily
Extremely modern turn of phrase, I’m yanked out of the setting immediately.
Odysseus tugged at his beard, pulling it into two slender forks— fashionable in the islands, but also an interesting nervous tic. Perhaps he used it to stall for time, or perhaps he liked the roughness of it sprouting from his chin.
Yeah, I’m getting that this book has a problem with telling, not showing. It’s a pretty common issue, especially with inexperienced authors (and hacks.) sometimes you do have to assume your readers aren’t complete idiots and don’t have to over explain every little thing. A stronger version of this might be, “Odysseus took a moment to tug his beard, pulling it into fashionable forks, his eyes roving over his audience as he took in their silence.” You can leave the implication of him using this to stall without spelling it outright.
I’m not going to go over the story of Helen as told by Odysseus here again, I’ve already complained about it. Just know it’s stupid and I hate it.
I will just mention that even though the book has Agamemnon and Menelaus buying Clytemnestra and Helen, according to some versions Helen actually CHOSE her own husband, which was fairly unusual, and it was part of the pact that all her suitors agreed to, that it would be her own choice of husband that she married. Just throwing that out there.
Of course Damia would betray her. Her first loyalty had always been to the gods. Even though they were not real, the gods had always exerted a malign influence on Achilles’s life. For a moment she caught herself wishing that they were real, that a divine neck would appear before her hands and she could crush its divine windpipe.
It’s honestly kind of weird that Achilles doesn’t believe in the gods? Believe in divine forces was very ubiquitous in the ancient world, and Achilles here lives in a novel where the gods are just straight up real! Why is he an atheist? (It’s just bc his mom made him be born a boy and he’s very mad about it)
Once, her violent impulses had horrified her, evidence of a manhood that would inevitably consume everything she loved about herself. But on her journey to Skyros and here on the island, she had met her share of violent women and knew better.
Lol. I mean, yeah, there ARE indeed violent women, and Greek mythology has its fair share of female warriors and murderesses. But I would say that the masculinity of warfare and warriorhood in both Bronze Age Europe and the Iliad itself is… pretty well established.
The final betrayal would come from the
original traitor, her own body. Odysseus would not dare strip a woman to prove her a boy, but once Damia revealed her, she would no doubt be held down and stripped of her tunic and underclothes, and the miserable dangling appendage that no treatment of herbs could remove would be her undoing. Odysseus’s pleasant ignorance would be more deadly than Kheiron’s cruelty. Onthe journey to Agamemnon’s army, she would have none of the herbs that had spared her the indignities of manhood, and the process would resume. Hair would sprout on her chest and shoulders and back as it had on Odysseus; a beard would follow; she would lose the fiery curls on her head; she would stink like a bull; her skin would roughen and bulge with veins; it would be worse than death.
Very dramatic. Now, I don’t know how Achilles is going to end up going to war in this book, but in the original myth, Odysseus didn’t need to strip anyone, he figured it out pretty fast lol. This is clearly born out of the idea that people are going to strip search anhone going into women’s bathrooms and like. I don’t think they need to!
Also, Achilles pre-emptively mourning his hair is funny because the Greek warriors in the Iliad absolutely had long hair, there seems to have been a strong association between virility and long hair, and you can see references to the warriors dressing their long hair and stuff in the Iliad. They aren’t going to shave you, that’s also a sign of being a warrior, calm down.
Achilles contemplates suicide. Do a flip!!!
Athena sadly intervenes though, and appears as some monstrous shape shifting owl. Okay! Why not! I’m actually not opposed at all to descriptions of the gods as horrifying eldritch beings! Let’s see if that keeps up!
In place of the owl, a woman stood beside her—but she was no woman.
No woman’s eyes were so unnaturally large, too enormous to turn in their sockets—owl’s eyes. She had no beak, but her thin gray lips skinned back to show her teeth, row after row of small white points exposed in a half-
moon smile. “My daughter,” she purred. Her low, strange voice sounded like tidewater on shingle, rough and raspy in one dimension, soft and sinuous in another. “It is easier to see you every night. You are beautiful, but you will become so much more beautiful when the fire inside you grows. This dull red of your hair will heat to a burning gold and the blood in you will boil. Your skin will be as molten metal, and even the gods will fear you.” The Silent One’s tongue flickered out, sliding along the margins of her thin-lipped mouth, as if the idea itself were nutritive. “Then your nickname—Pyrrha—will be prophetic, and the flames of your hair will consume this world.”
I actually don’t hate the first two lines, particularly the “half moon smile” bit. I do think the later description gets kind of lost in itself with the voice being “tidewater on a shingle” (what does that mean? What does that even evoke?) and then over explaining what’s meant by that comparison, and it just muddles the whole thing. A lot of this book reads as very first draft-y to me, and I want to clean it up very badly.
“As if the idea itself was nutrive.”
No. This comes across as try-hard and there has to be a more eloquent way to get this across. “Her tongue licking along her thin lips, as if lapping up the idea itself.” Idk, just spitballing here.
Achilles stared at her. “Of course I would dream Athena as a monster.”
The gray-eyed owl-woman tilted her head to one side. “That is humor, yes? I remember humor. Wit. Verbal irony. A playful juxtaposition of uncollapsed possibilities. The sudden withdrawal of a threat. Laughter comes from the sound that our animal ancestors made to signal that the predators had all gone away. Are you trying to reassure yourself?”
There’s ALMOST a good idea in here. The idea of the goddess of wisdom and strategy being coldly logical and unable to understand the vagaries of human emotion is a solid concept, however, everyone in the book kind of talks like this so it doesn’t come across right. (Also, do they have evolutionary psychology in this magic Bronze Age setting now?)
Athena promises Achilles a womb if he stops bitching about it. Okay. At some point I will have to do more research on ancient castration practices, but I do know that you had a pretty solid chance of dying from a UTI, especially if you lopped the dick off, because they didn’t have catheters back then! Fun!
She dressed that day for battle. The underclothes she wore were tighter than
usual, formfitting around her waist and under her groin, holding everything crushed flat to preserve her dignity until she was inevitably betrayed. A giddy nausea cramped her belly, tightening the muscles of her pelvis like wires.
The dressing for battle idea is fine, I guess, but I don’t like that description of nausea. The author is clearly trying to create a lot of evocative imagery but it just has me questioning what my muscles turning into wires actually means.
Deidamia offered her the comb again, but she refused it, braiding her hair into one enormous red mass like a boar’s-tusk helmet of fiery curls. She pinned her tunic carefully, to once again emphasize her full chest and narrow waist, and also for dignity’s sake. When they finally humiliated her, let them see what they were destroying.
Yeah, okay. I’m sure that will give them pause and make them feel bad. We all know all women have big boobs and tiny waists after all. And we all know Ancient Greek men were extremely respectful of women’s bodies in general.
Achilles’ daring plan is to murder them all. You know what, I’ll give credit where it’s due. That is the only plan Achilles does ever seem to have in the Iliad!
I still want to point out Rome is founded in Mythology after this, I wonder if it will play a part in it.