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A review by connorscottgardner
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
5.0
I cried for the last hour reading this. And I've been crying since I finished.
I love retellings of myths, but I have never read one that captures the anguish of war, and the pain of being raised to be brilliant, with no other possible life in front of you quite like this book did. How utterly devastating.
I've read the Iliad many times, and I'm actually currently reading a translation of it that I haven't read before. So I knew what would happen. I knew, but it did not make the pain any easier to bear.
The characters felt so real, their pain so exact, their joy and growth and ultimately their weaknesses jumped out of the page. They felt like people who you could believe in, because they were neither good nor evil. And isn't that the ultimate cost of war? Soldiers fight. Inocent people die. And in the end, there is no real victory, for everyone has lost so much, nobody returns home the same as when they left.
Chiron captured the absolute tragedy of it best.
I love retellings of myths, but I have never read one that captures the anguish of war, and the pain of being raised to be brilliant, with no other possible life in front of you quite like this book did. How utterly devastating.
I've read the Iliad many times, and I'm actually currently reading a translation of it that I haven't read before. So I knew what would happen. I knew, but it did not make the pain any easier to bear.
The characters felt so real, their pain so exact, their joy and growth and ultimately their weaknesses jumped out of the page. They felt like people who you could believe in, because they were neither good nor evil. And isn't that the ultimate cost of war? Soldiers fight. Inocent people die. And in the end, there is no real victory, for everyone has lost so much, nobody returns home the same as when they left.
Chiron captured the absolute tragedy of it best.
"There is no law that gods must be fair, Achilles," Chiron said. "And perhaps it is the greater grief, after all, to be left on earth, when another is gone. Do you think?"