THE WAR AT TROY

Name: THE WAR AT TROY
Author: Lindsay Clarke
ISBN: 0-312-33657-8

by Lindsay Clarke ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 17, 2004

Clarke uses a modern idiom that’s sometimes jarring (“Hera hissed, ‘Don’t you dare take any notice of that mindless bitch’...

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Whitbread-winner Clarke (The Chymical Wedding, 1989, etc.) offers a fresh and lively retelling of the Trojan War: a kind of ur-text of the events that made Homer famous.

Peleus and Thetis provide a good example of the most dangerous part of planning a wedding: the guest list. They blackball Eris, the Goddess of Discord, who takes her revenge by tossing a golden apple marked “To the Fairest” into the banquet hall. Naturally, Hera, Athene, and Aphrodite all go ballistic and turn to Zeus to settle the dispute—which he does by passing the buck to Paris, the most beautiful man in the world, and asking him to judge. By choosing Aphrodite, Goddess of Love, Paris earns the hand of Helen, the most beautiful woman alive—and that’s where all hell breaks loose. Helen is the wife of King Menelaus of Sparta, who flies into a royal rage when Paris abducts his bride to Troy. Menelaus invokes a prenuptial agreement he’d made with all of Helen’s prior suitors (who had agreed in advance to support whomever she chooses to wed), and the whole of Greece goes to war against Troy. You probably remember the story, with all the familiar characters here: the noble warriors Hector, Achilles, and Patroclus; the kings Agamemnon, Menelaus, and Laomedon; the wily Odysseus; and the resourceful Aeneas. We get as far as Odysseus’s breach of the walls of Troy with his wooden horse, although the narrator (a certain Phemius of Ithaca) lets us know that he was present at the hero’s homecoming—so a sequel is probably in the offing.

Clarke uses a modern idiom that’s sometimes jarring (“Hera hissed, ‘Don’t you dare take any notice of that mindless bitch’ ”) but never ridiculous, and he manages to keep the large cast of characters from stumbling all over each other on the page—more than can be said for Homer.

Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2004

ISBN: 0-312-33657-8

Page Count: 464

Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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BETWEEN SISTERS

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2003

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...

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Sisters in and out of love.

Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.

Pub Date: May 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-345-45073-6

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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THE ALCHEMIST

by Paulo Coelho & translated by Margaret Jull Costa ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1993

Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.

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Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.

The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.

Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.