Customer Reviews

Jason

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My prejudices would ordinarily lie against this book, since this series by Treece takes Greek myths and "humanizes" them, that is, makes them into first-person historical narratives lacking the mythological element. Unless you've read the books, it would seem that this would cheapen the myths.

That's the wrong way to take these books. Read simply as historical fiction, these are as good as that genre gets. Treece is one of those too-rare writers who is good at every level - sentence level, paragraph level, chapter level, character/plot level, thematic level. I have never read anything that seems to get inside the heads of the ancient Greeks in the way this book does, but that is only one of its charms. The action is relentless but always in service of the story, the violence ever-present without being gratuitous, the characters believable but never conventional, and the prose outstanding. This series reminds me of Graves' "I, Claudius" books or Wolfe's "Latro" series, only better.

The only reason it is out of print and evidently forgotten is because people in the 21st century are not nearly as smart as their ancestors and wouldn't know a good book if it bit them on the bottom. Get this one as soon as possible and prepare to live in it for a week or two.