Review of The Song of Achilles: A Novel
What’s up everybody my name is Irfan Ishfaq. Today I am talking about a review of this song of Achilles by Madeline Miller, A tale of gods, kings, immortal fame, and the human heart, The Song of Achilles is a dazzling literary feat that brilliantly reimagines Homer’s enduring masterwork, The Iliad. An action-packed adventure, an epic love story, a marvelously conceived and executed page-turner, Miller’s monumental debut novel, so I was excited to read this book. I did recently read her newest book called Circe.
Which I enjoyed but the song of Achilles has gotten a lot of praise, I was excited to just get into it see what was going on and this is, of course, the story of Achilles. You know that famous hero who had the Achilles heel one NIC and it just all goes down . This is the story of the Trojan War but that’s kind of just what the story is on the outside because this book is not told from Achilles' perspective in this book is told from a perspective of a boy named Petro CLIs. He grows up alongside Achilles he was born as a kind of a disappointment to his father he wasn’t this great hero or a good fighter or anything like that and he does get sent away to be trained and hopefully, something will come of him but when he meets Kelly’s they quickly become very very good friends and that friendship quickly blooms into something a lot deeper.
It is the love that these two men share, how passionate their relationship is
that drives this story forward which is very unique when it comes to retelling a Greek myth. I enjoyed it I liked looking at it through this lens. I also liked looking at it through the lens of you know we are petroglyphs. We know that Achilles is destined to be this great hero but a lot is riding on that. It is specifically said in the book that heroes can never have it both ways they can’t be heroes, be happy but Achilles swears that he is going to be the first he will be that hero that he is destined to be but he will still be happy. He wills to live out his days with Patronus which you know famous last words because when we start
to get into the Trojan War and this is a long bloody war that lasts for a very
a long time of course they come, call on Achilles because he’s the greatest
fighter of their entire generation. The way that this war tests their
the relationship the way that this war tests who they are as people is really
It fascinating and I did like where I ended up with this book however I will
say that I wanted or from these characters I wanted them
to feel like characters as it was it does feel like a Greek epic. It does feel
like these are the actual Greek characters and the problem with that is
that they’re not super nuanced . They’re not super complex and we spend a
a lot of time with petroglyphs and with Achilles but they don’t feel like
real people, they felt like the myth the legend that you know Madeline Miller is
talking about, I think the reason I was looking for more was that with Circe you really get to go into that feminine perspective and you do get to feel like the choices that these characters make and you do feel like this could be something that could happen like Circe could be a character that you know and those things that I loved in Circe the thing is she wrote
Circe after the song of Achilles so all of the problems that I have with a song of
Achilles gets fixed in Circe so it’s not a big deal I just found myself
wanting a little bit more and I also think that the height for this book got
my hopes up high along with readings thirsty first so what I will
say is if you haven’t read Circe go ahead and read song of Achilles because
one they have nothing to do with each other. I think her writing just
improves as you get into the next book. I will also say that it’s just not as emotional as people were saying it was going to be now that’s probably just me talking I read a lot of emotional books and I am stone-cold and I want things to hurt me and this it hurt but not as much as I think people wanted it to hurt me but I still really enjoyed it. I still would recommend this book and it’s getting a B+ for me but anyway thank you guys so much for reading this
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bye