
by Madeline Miller
Ecco, 2012
This review was originally posted on my Goodreads account in early February 2013. I’m reposting it here, given that I refer to it not infrequently.
I was astounded by this book. Madeline Miller’s achievement cannot be overstated. Here’s a novel that’s absorbingly readable for a modern audience, but that still has the poetry of Homeric sagas. What’s most impressive to me is the balance she finds between exploring the universality of human nature throughout the ages and maintaining the innate alien-ness that I experience every time I read The Iliad—the culture of archaic Greece was so very different from this world we live in today. She lets the truth of that age live and breathe without trying to tame or update it.
And yet, I recognize myself in this story.
Continue reading “Book Review: The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller”