Review: Alexander and Alestria by Shan Sa

Title: Alexander and Alestria
Author: Shan Sa
Genre: Historical Fiction
Publisher: Harper Collins
Published: 2008
Pages: 256

Rating: 2 out of 10

This book attempts to show the reader what Alexander the Great's life was like as a child, teenager, and young man, and the road that led him to "greatness." It also draws attention to Queen Alestria, the woman he married, and the complex, unusual relationship that they shared.

I was very excited about checking this book out from my library, but only a few chapters in, my anticipation was no more.
It is clumsily written, as if the author threw together a last minute draft and left it at that.

The characters are horrible, lifeless little sketches that make no sense. I often got the feeling that Shan Sa was trying to impress upon the reader that Alexander and Alestria were not like us. They were gods, beyond the comprehension of mere mortals. No attempt was made to create likable, relateable characters.

The text was dry, and somehow, nothing much ever seemed to happen. The author went on about the events of Alexander's life in an uninspired manner, and I imagined more than once listening to this book on audio and hearing a droning, monotone robot voice reading it to me.

Also, the sexual side of the story seemed strange to me. Alexander has sex with his own mother, and she asks him to? This was not completely clear - but it is certainly very heavily hinted at. However, far more than hinted were the scenes with Alexander's father. His father desires him sexually, and Alexander actually feels the same. What?
Although of course there could be deep, but plausible, psychological explanations for this (the abused forces himself to believe that it's what he wants as a coping mechanism, common in victims), the author has no intention of exploring them. As a result, Alexander comes across as a twisted, perverted man.
Misunderstood? Probably. But not in the author's eyes.
I was hoping for an intricate, well woven love triangle as Alexander struggles between his love for both a man and a woman. That story told from Alestria's side as well would have surely been a heartbreaking one.

However, please do not expect to share in any sort of emotion or feeling from the characters here. Disappointingly, this book is not what I was hoping it would be.

Review: Homer's Daughter by Robert Graves

Title: Homer's Daughter
Author: Robert Graves
Genre: Literary / Historical Fiction
Publisher: Academy Chicago
First published: 1955
Pages: 283

Rating: 5 out of 10

On the island of Sicily in the Ancient Greek empire, order has been overthrown. The kingdom's crown prince has disappeared while on a voyage at sea, and is now presumed dead, leaving the Princess Nausicaa next in line for the throne. Both her new status and her beauty have encouraged countless men to swarm the palace, all competing for Nausicaa's affection and her hand in marriage. To further the chaos, the king has impulsively embarked on a journey to find his lost son. Nausicaa, relying on her wits, schemes for a way to get out of marriage without angering her suitors, while finding solace in bard's tales of Odysseus and the discovery of a mysterious shipwrecked man named Aethon.

I love Robert Graves, and I, Claudius is one of my favorite books. I was so looking forward to returning to his world of Ancient kingdoms, complete with complex politics and plots and intrigues and alliances.

But Homer's Daughter wasn't at all like Claudius' story. Nothing of importance happens at first, and the story takes a long while to get started. And it was far more simplistic, while I had loved I, Claudius for its complexity.
Once Nausicaa finds Aethon, the story picks up a bit, and the storyline revolves more around the problem of the suitors. The former focus, which was on the lost prince, didn't seem to carry itself so well. The two do come together eventually, and I suppose that the solution to both problems was satisfying.

Graves' writing is a bit distant, with graceful poise. Here, his writing was not so much graceful as it was simply distant. I never felt that I got to know Nausicaa as I did Claudius, and other characters seemed to be hurriedly dismissed at simple, easy characterizations. Examples of these one-dimensional characters would be Ctimene, who is shallow and stupid, Eurymachus, who is "bad," and Aethon, who is "good."

I liked the parallels between the Odyssey that could be found in the story, such as Nausicaa's many suitors (like the men vying for Penelope in Odysseus' absence), or a man found washed upon the shore who is more or less imprisoned by a beautiful woman who falls in love with him.
The book had a mythological air to it in the way that it was told.

Robert Graves excitedly wrote this book after reading a theory by Samuel Butler about the author of the Odyssey being a female instead of the traditionally credited Homer. It is a very intriguing theory, and I would love to know more about it. There is a note before the book begins, which is about three pages, that I hoped to gather more information from.
However, it says little to nothing, simply that Graves has found evidence that he calls "irrefutable." A strong word. However, he goes on to casually throw out a handful of speculations, none of which present "irrefutable" evidence. I would have liked a better and more convincing approach to this story.

Nausicaa does not begin to compose her Odyssey until the book is nearly finished, and it seemed a bit rushed to me. Nausicaa had composed a few verses before, but nothing to lead us to suspect she was about to write one of the greatest epics of all time.

Review: The Assembly of Women by Aristophanes

Title: The Assembly of Women
Author: Aristophanes
Genre: Classics / Classical Literature / Plays
Origin: 391 B.C.

Rating: 7 out of 10

The Assembly of Women, or, Ἐκκλησιάζουσαι, reminded me very strongly of my favorite Aristophanes, Lysistrata. If you loved that play as much as I did, you will enjoy this one as well.

The first scene starts off with a group of wives in Ancient Athens stealing their husband's clothes and setting off to speak at the male-only Assembly. Their novel ideas, which concern land ownership, equality, and even sex, are met with a mixture of both outraged indignation and curious popularity.

This play was very fun, and I loved the spirited, mischievously intelligent women. I cannot leave out their exaggeratedly slow witted husbands, who were hilarious.

Aristophanes is perhaps the world's first champion of women's rights, and he puts his ideas into comedy very well.

Review: Troilus and Cressida

Title: Troilus and Cressida
Author: William Shakespeare
Genre: Plays / Classics
Written: 1602 (probable)

Rating - 4 out of 10

More than any other author, I never like finding fault with Shakespeare, even though with some imperfect plays of his, it isn't all that difficult. Well, this was one of those plays. It's Shakespeare, yes, but a flawed one.

Troilus and Cressida is about a young man, Troilus, and his lover, Cressida. Set during the Trojan War, among other characters are the recognizable Achilles, Hector, Helen and Paris.
The main character's love story never seems very convincing. Troilus is constantly praising his beloved highly, while another character does his best to convince him of her low morals. And strangely, Troilus and Cressida are rarely in the same room or the same scene together. Most of their supposed "romance" is via them talking or thinking about each other separately.

The character of Cressida is not very built up at all. It takes a few scenes for her to enter the story, and once she does, virtually nothing about her is revealed. One catches fleeting glimpses of a feisty nature, but other than this, all we seem to really know of Cressida is that she is beautiful (and only because this is proclaimed by Troilus over and over). Shakespeare even goes so far as to say that her beauty rivals that of Helen's. I kept waiting for her to come more into focus, yet she never came out of the background. As a result, we have a lone character telling us that he is in love and in the middle of an epic romance, without any evidence of this, not even Cressida herself.

Another thing that I disliked about this play was how much dialogue there was. Yes, I know that plays are all dialogue, but what I mean is, no one ever did anything. All that the characters ever did was talk - and never about anything relevant.
These endless talks are not involved with the book's plot in any major way, save that the Trojan War is its setting, of course. They also seem to lead nowhere, and are simply dry and dull. Characters discuss battle tactics and war strategies, but nothing ever comes of them, making me wonder why they would be included in the first place.

I had never before seen Shakespeare write such dreadfully tedious scenes.
And besides the endless talking, I disliked the ending, in which Cressida is caught being unfaithful by Troilus. After that, she simply disappears altogether! She is not brought back into the story again for the entire book, besides when a letter arrives from her, which still offers little closure.

All in all, I disliked this one. Not recommended unless you want to read through Shakespeare's work in its entirety.

Review: Spartan by Valerio Massimo Manfredi

Title: Spartan
Author: Valerio Massimo Manfredi
Genre: Historical Fiction
Publisher: Washington Square
Published: 2007
Pages: 314

Rating: 2 out of 10

In Ancient Sparta, twin boys are born into a powerful family. One is strong and healthy, but the other has been struck with the most terrible malady a Spartan can have - he is crippled, which means he will never be able to fight a battle. Thus, he is abandoned in the mountains and left to die. The baby, Talos, is found by a Helot shepherd and raised ignorant of his identity, while his brother Brithos is raised as a warrior. Eventually, Talos participates in the Battle of Thermopylae.

I have to say, I didn't like anything about this book and was glad to finish it. Despite all the action and battles, I felt bored.

Perhaps in the original Italian, this book was better, but the writing style seemed stiff and removed. Conversation was stilted and awkward, besides the characters employing a lot of modern words mixed in with old fashioned ones.

The entire premise of the story seemed unlikely and not at all believable. Talos just so happens to be abandoned and found by a Helot, who also happens to be an ancient, revered former warrior. Then, Talos happens to become involved with his twin brother without knowing that they are related. And yes, Talos is a cripple, but that doesn't stop him from becoming a mighty, legendary warrior.
It all sounds perfect for a story - but never once did I believe any of it, which I always view as a very negative thing in books.
The way that Manfredi presented everything only made me roll my eyes at how very unlikely it was.

Talos is obviously supposed to be someone special, a sort of prodigy, someone different and unbelievably talented, and the author is forever singing his praises. At one point, Talos is described as "like no other man on earth." Personally, I could never see where all of this reverence came from. I couldn't bring myself to like Talos - he was stupid and self-important.
Another character, his brother Brithos, was made into the literal "evil twin" (*snicker*), and Manfredi floods us with information about just how "bad" Brithos is in comparison to angelic Talos. With every scene Brithos is featured, he does something dramatically villainous. It struck me as a shortcut for the author - he wanted a bad guy but couldn't be bothered with building any sort of character for him.
So why not have the guy dabble in rape, murder, and other such cruelties the moment he's introduced?

*spoilers in this paragraph* Manfredi also seems very fond of killing off major characters. Throughout the book, there is always Talos as the main character, along with another very present major character. At first, it is his Helot guardian, Kritolaos. Later it is his brother Brithos, later another soldier that he befriends.
And very, suspiciously neatly, they are all killed just in time for the next one to come along. I especially saw Brithos' death as a bad decision, and it was pretty early in the book. He seemed such a big part of the plot, I didn't see how it made sense to have him die.
Then again, I suppose that he had already done all he could - he marched in being bad, soon afterward Talos finds out that his worst enemy is also his brother, they kind of make up and work out their differences, the end.
Except, this happened in only the first third of the book.

The whole thing was very messy, and the above is a perfect example of the author's lack of a strong plot, complete lack of strong characters, and knack for bad timing.

I will not be looking for any more of the author's work.

Review: A Fair Wind for Troy by Doris Gates

Title: A Fair Wind for Troy
Author: Doris Gates
Genre: Mythology
Publisher: Puffin
Published: 1984
Pages: 96

Rating: 3 out of 10

I love the Trojan War, but why does every author tell it in the same way? There are so many characters and sides and intricate details to it, I suppose that the reader does admittedly need to know the same basic details every time. But I have found that most authors who decide to write the tale of the Trojans perform their execution in much the same way: distant, factual, and unbiased as to which side or character they would prefer to see come out victorious. Rarely does the story stay with a single character. For all of the books I have read on the subject, I still have no sense that I have ever come to know any of the characters.

This one is no different, perhaps even worse. It covers the tale of Helen being given away in marriage, the story of Paris giving an apple to his favorite goddess, and then touches lightly upon how Odysseus leaves home. It then focuses quite heavily on the tale of Iphigenia, a lesser known character who was the daughter of Agamemnon.
As for the actual war, it was brushed over in the last few pages and not really covered.

The book had no plot, purpose, or point. There was no main character and little connection between the few relatively unrelated stories that each chapter told.
No character was ever looked into in even the most cursory way, and the whole thing was scattered and messy.

This book is rather short at only 96 pages (though the print is trickily small), and I am pretty sure that it is a children's or at least YA book.
Therefore, I was amused at the illustrations. There were 4 or 5 full page, pretty illustrations. Well done, but if this is a children's book, why are the characters of the drawings so sensually portrayed? Not a single one failed to accentuate the just-barely-covered breasts, privates, or buttocks. I just thought that this was a bit strange, given the age group the book is aimed at.

I cannot recommend this confusingly jerky book to anyone. In fact, I think that I would dissuade you from reading it even more strongly if you like the Trojan War. This one covers it in such a way as to make it almost insulting.
Not a good find, I'm afraid.