Book Review: Song of Achilles

Winner of the 2012 Orange prize for fiction, the Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller is an incredible piece of writing. 
​
I found out about this book from my students! They chose it as the first book for our Literature Club to read, and I was astounded at the strength of the writing. As my students work on their own novels (Yes, these are teens in the midst of writing novels. I'm so proud!), this book has provided us with great discussions on language, classical convention, protagonist development, and sympathetic narrators, among other things.

Miller's prose is incredibly plain. Her language is unadorned and direct, but like an arrow it strikes at the reader's heart. I especially love her presentation of Chiron, Odysseus, and yes, even Achilles--a character on the first read of the Illiad that I found pompous and annoying. 

Her choice of a protagonist is her first and best step toward creating an unforgettable book. I love novels that are told from the "outsider" perspective, and Miller has managed to take a story we all know and turn it on its head. This alone could make me love her novel, but what could be a parlor trick becomes more and more relevant as our anti-hero takes his journey to Troy's gates.

Her female characters and her portrayal of women in general feels terrifyingly accurate. Miller is a classical scholar, so I know that she has years of research and education rattling around as she wrote this book. And yet, when I read the text, that sense of knowing goes beyond reason and begins to fall into the realm of sense and emotion. It's this "felt sense" that moved me and the teenage girls in Literature Club to screaming excitement at how good this book really is!

Read it. And then recommend it to two other people and fanatically convince them to read it. *Notable for its ability to bring discussions of gender, power, and sexuality into any room. My husband and I ended up talking about it for at least an hour after I convinced him to pick it up for a quick read.