Chasing Odysseus by Sulari GentillMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed.
No, wait.
I'm kinda mad, too.
I LOVE myths and legends. I love epic sagas with quests and heroes and mythical creatures and gods. So, obviously, I'm a big fan of Homer's The Odyssey. Odysseus himself is one of my favourite characters to read about repeatedly because he was so cunning, clever, diplomatic, patriotic, and ultimately a pretty decent guy.
So, yeah, it kinda sucked to read this re-telling, where he was reduced to seeming no more than a petulant child and arrogant tyrant.
If you're looking for an easy-to-read overview of The Odyssey, this is decent because it pretty much recounts everything that befell Odysseus after the fall of Troy. But it flips the script and turns O into the Big Bad, and throws us a bunch of kids as accidental heroes instead.
The story seemed pretty weak to me. The kids made a lot of questionable decisions, and the reasoning was terrible. Their entire quest to follow O in order to restore their good name was a bit far-fetched, and because it was trying so hard to re-tell O's story, the story of the herdsmen's adventure felt quite forced. Also kinda ridiculous that these three insignificant kids have friends in all the right places, while the legendary warrior Odysseus cops eye rolls and ire everywhere he goes. (view spoiler)
It irked me immensely that everyone fawned over these dumb kids when O was copping sh*t from all directions. Like, basically O is the bad guy and EVERY SINGLE OTHER PERSON OR THING he encounters is just misunderstood. There was also a really strange contrast between the YA format and the bloody, brutal, vulgar and downright indecent happenings of the original story seeping in. It really just felt like a messy splice of two stories that never really fit but kinda just got shoved together haphazardly.
The actual writing didn't really help, either, because it was a bit too much 'tell' and not enough 'show' or 'feel', so I never really appreciated our heroes. They were very two-dimensional, and even the humour fell flat because there was no sense of spirit to go with it. I didn't really FEEL anything, except mad that O was being exploited for this terrible story.
Also. Just quietly. My money is on the author being vegan. I'm just saying. No problem with it, but this book is very preachy with the whole, 'we are herdsman, we sacrifice fruit and vegetables instead of animals'. I mean how did they not actually p*ss off the gods when everyone else was sacrificing the good sh*t?
I was so looking forward to this but it rubbed me the wrong way, taking an epic story with characters I love and making a farce of it. Poor form, in my opinion.
Not particularly enticed to read the follow-up, unfortunately.
View all my reviews
No comments:
Post a Comment