Review by Booklist Review
Gr. 10-12. Geras frames her latest ambitious novel around the Iliad, beginning a decade into the Trojan War. Instead of detailing the battles between gods or men, she imagines the stories of Troy's women, adding new characters to the archetypes in Homer's epic. Orphan sisters Xanthe and Marpessa live in Priam's palace as maids and surrogate daughters to Andromache and Helen, respectively. As the war escalates, pivotal moments from the Iliad's plot serve as backdrop for Xanthe and Marpessa's coming-of-age: while the familiar men (Paris, Achilles, etc.) slay one another, the sisters fall in love with the same man and care for their grieving households. Readers, particularly those unfamiliar with the Iliad, may struggle initially with the novel's multiple plot threads. But Geras cleverly fills in gaps with the words of visiting Gods and Gossips, as she tells a sexy, sweeping tale, filled with drama, sassy humor, and vividly imagined domestic details that will be accessible to most older teens (and adults), particularly fans of historical romances. Readers may want to follow this with Clemence McLaren's Inside the Walls of Troy (1996) or Waiting for Odysseus [BKL Mr 1 00], both written in women's voices. --Gillian Engberg
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
"With exceptional grace and energy, Geras recreates the saga of the Trojan War by delving into the hearts and minds of the women of Troy," wrote PW in our Best Books citation. Ages 14-up. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by School Library Journal Review
Gr 9 Up-The Trojan War was the original miniseries; trying to cram it into one volume is an epic task. Homer could count on his audience's familiarity with the story. Roger Lancelyn Green, in The Tale of Troy (Puffin, 1995), began deep into the prewar past and narrated chronologically. Geras, like Homer, sets her novel in the last months of the 10-year conflict. She incorporates the back story by an ingenious (but artificial) means: describing tapestries, recounting gossips' chatter or the revelations of visiting gods. (The gods appear and speak, but the mortals are skeptical or forgetful.) There's still a lot to keep straight, and readers will struggle. It doesn't help that the two invented sister characters at the center of the novel are thin, one-dimensional figures: their love for the same man (an equally undeveloped character) is meant to be the focus, but remains at the romance-novel level. The diction ranges from British to slang ("tits," "screw," and "Hera hangs around with Agamemnon"); the absence of specific terms (like amphora or chiton) sacrifices atmosphere for easier reading. The inherent drama of Troy is replaced by the simpler love conflict and its attendant woes (like an unplanned pregnancy). Sometimes Geras's writing is inspired, but Clemence McLaren's Inside the Walls of Troy (Atheneum, 1996) and Paul Fleischman's Dateline: Troy (Candlewick, 1996) are still much better bets.-Patricia Lothrop-Green, St. George's School, Newport, RI (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Horn Book Review
(High School) Homer's immortal tales of Paris and Helen, Achilles and Hector, and Odysseus and the Trojan horse are here recast in the form of a modern novel, using the heroes' fates as both background and focus for Geras's real subjects: the women of Troy. Most of the narrative focuses on two sisters, Xanthe, maidservant to Hector's wife Andromache and nurse to wounded soldiers in what she has dubbed the Blood Room, and her sister Marpessa, seeress and maid to Helen of Troy. The gods take a hand in this sisterly relationship, causing both girls to fall in love with Alastor, one of Xanthe's patients in the Blood Room. As in the epics, love and war are inseparable themes, though here the heroic shares space with the ordinary+Geras handles most exposition through dialogue, using accessible, commonplace language and sometimes even British slang (a convention that may be initially jarring to American readers). The entanglement of the two sisters' destinies with the fate of the doomed city and the larger drama of the heroes' deeds is so successfully wrought that it's hard to say whether the story belongs to Xanthe and Marpessa, with the Trojan War as background, or whether the story is chiefly a Trojan cycle retelling, using the sisters for human interest. Both strands climax tragically with the sack of Troy, during which Xanthe's nursemaid charge, Hector's infant son, is thrown from the walls to prevent him from ever avenging his father. The women experience war more as grief, destruction, and want than as heroic, though terrible, deeds, but Geras handles both her chosen perspective and her subject's grand themes with aplomb. (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
