Amber & Clay

Continuing with my ancient Greek historical fiction binge, I finished Amber & Clay in less than 24 hours. The book looks huge, but it's partly written in blank verse and there are object illustrations, so it's not as long as it appears. (Not that I'm averse to long books, but for a children's book, it was Harry Potter/Riordan level thick.) 

Amber & Clay is set in the late 5th century/early 4th century BCE in Greece. It follows the lives of two young characters. The first is a slave boy named Rhaskos. The second is an aristocratic girl named Melisto. 

Rhaskos' chapters are written in blank verse and follow his life as a slave, beginning in Thessaly. Melisto's are in prose and they begin when she gets a new nurse, who just happens to be Rhaskos' mother, sold and now living in Athens. Rhaskos' is intelligent and artistic. Melisto is wild and untamed. Both characters are abused: Rhaskos of course by his masters and Melisto by her mother, who hates her. 

Melisto shines in her final, but lengthy, chapter, when she goes to Brauron to become one of Artemis's "Little Bears," young Athenian girls who serve at her temple for a year or more. When a bear cub is delivered to the shrine for sacrifice, Melisto works to tame it and becomes its protector. The priestess and heads of the temple take their time trying to figure out what to do with it, as a bear has never been sacrificed before, but when the decision is made, Melisto sneaks into the bear's stall and frees it during a storm. She performs the Bear Dance to Artemis as she leads the bear away to safety, but she's struck by lightning and killed at 10 years old. 

Back in Athens, Rhaskos' mother writes a curse tablet, summoning Melisto's ghost to free Rhaskos from slavery. The rest of the book is mostly in blank verse, being chapters mostly about Rhaskos. (The gods pop in and out, too.) Melisto hovers in the background, trying to help as much as a ghost can, but finally appears in a speaking role at the end, freeing Rhaskos and saving his master's family from having to leave Athens. Rhaskos' master is a former slave and needed a protector who was a citizen to watch over him. Melisto sends Rhaskos to her father who becomes the family's protector once Rhaskos has proven he actually knew Melisto's ghost.

The book is sprinkled with great illustrations that are a museum catalogue of artifacts that tie into the story. I loved that aspect. 

I'm not a fan of blank verse, so I'm glad I had no idea this book was mostly written in it or I may have skipped it. I enjoyed it and even cried at the end when Rhaskos is telling Melisto's father a story that only he and she would have known. I loved Melisto and felt she could have been kept alive a little bit longer, as she dies before the book is even halfway over. 

I think the book would have also been fine without Socrates as a character. He becomes a friend to Rhaskos, but I just don't think he was necessary. The philosophical discussions were okay, but could have been removed or replaced with something else. 

This is also the second book I've read recently that tries to occasionally instruct on ancient Greek pronunciation and gets it wrong. Yeah, I just looked this up to be sure and the author this time is using modern Greek pronunciation. The language changed over time. If you're going to have instruction in your book, make SURE you've got the right pronunciations. Even disregarding my having two years of Ancient Greek, it didn't take me that long to Google, so there's no excuse to teach readers the wrong things.

Overall though, a good read! I recommend it.

Trojan War 1

I saw this book on Amazon and ordered it right away, then picked up the one I'm going to review second to finally finish before this one arrived. 

Both of these books tell stories from the Trojan War from the perspective of the women. 

A Thousand Ships covers a lot of female voices. There are the Trojan Women, of course. Andromache, Cassandra, Hecuba (called Hecabe, which is actually more correct but I have trouble remembering that's her), Briseis and Chryseis, the lesser-known Polyxena. Helen. Then the Greek side, which is mainly Iphigenia, Clytemnestra and Penelope. Of course we've also got the gods present, too. 

The chapters are each from a different point of view. Some of the most important are Calliope's. As the muse ("Sing, O muse"), she appears in between chapters occasionally and I love her chapters. 

The Trojan women are lumped together for the most part. Andromache gets the penultimate chapter. Polyxena gets one, Cassandra gets multiples. Cassandra is presented as basically being mentally ill. Her curse is that she sees the future but no one believes her. I'm not sure it's ever been handled in such a brutal fashion but she's being driven mad. She constantly talks or at least mouths words, she drools, she stares into space or at things only she can see. Her curse doesn't work randomly either. The first thing she sees when she meets someone new is the worst thing that's going to happen to them. She's both an extremely sympathetic character and also very frustrating. Apollo came to her one night in his temple and tried to seduce her, but she asked for a favor in return, got it...and then refused to sleep with him. If you're getting a favor from a god, you do not back down from that bargain. Nope. Just fuck him and take the gift you chose. Make it a good one. So she's sympathetic because she's a fucking mess, but she also broke a bargain with a god after receiving her reward, so she got herself into it. Briseis is treated very fleetingly and she shares a chapter with Chryseis, who gets the bigger role. Briseis also makes it so Chryseis is never raped by Agamemnon, which rang amazingly untrue. It was, in my opinion, the worst bit of writing in the book because it's just too unbelievable. 

Penelope's chapters retell The Odyssey in the form of letters she's writing to Odysseus. She's been hearing of his exploits from bards and yeah, she's not happy. It's a unique portrayal of Penelope, who's like the pinnacle of patience and wifely virtue. So of course, I really like it. 

The gods' chapters... Well, let's say I hope the author doesn't actually believe in them or she's in for it. Hera gets a better portrayal than usual, but Aphrodite is shallow and Athena. Wooooooo boy. She's written as insecure of her physical appearance but also as so in love with Odysseus that she's considering seducing him in a disguise. Athena, one of the VIRGIN goddesses. Eris had my favorite chapters. She's presented almost like Cassandra. Like she's so chaotic she can't think straight or remember straight or do much of anything aside from cause trouble which then she forgets she did. Themis also gets a showing, as does Gaea. You see, the whole reason for the Trojan War is that Gaea asked Zeus to do some population control because there were too many humans. So he plotted with Themis, his ex-wife, and they came up with the war idea. The golden apple actually came from Themis. That was a pretty interesting twist. 

Overall, this is a rather simply-written but still quite good book on the Trojan War from the perspective of the women. Because it covers so many of them, they're mostly given too little screentime. My only real complaint is that it's perhaps too watered down. It tells sad stories, yes, but it pulls the punches.

If A Thousand Ships pulls punches, The Silence of the Girls puts on brass knuckles. This is the one that tells what feels like the true story of the Trojan War. Its problem is that it doesn't tell enough of them. 

The main character of this is Briseis. The time period covered is from when her city of Lyrnessus is sacked by the Greeks to after the end of the war, but the meat of the book is her time with Achilles, then stuck with Agamemnon, then back with Achilles before he dies. 

There are several other female characters in here, but the only more known one is Chryseis, who plays a tiny role. And definitely is not saved from rape by some magic herbs Briseis gave her, as is what happened in A Thousand Ships. (Seriously, Briseis just happened to have some herbs that would drug Agamemnon each night.) 

This book shines in that it isn't afraid to tell the really ugly details. Briseis even calls it a "rape camp" near the end. 

However, it's far from perfect. Achilles gets wayyyyy too much screentime. For a book talking about silencing women, its second largest character with a voice is a man. And the book never really addresses Achilles and Patroclus as lovers. It says they may have been at one point, but claims they have a far more intimate relationship now. Why even bother with that? Just make them lovers. You damn well know they were. While history has improved in that it doesn't ignore that relationship as much, it needs to actually recognize it, too. 

These two books were interesting to read back to back because they are so very different. If you're interested in ancient history and mythology, give these a go. 

I've got more ancient Greek books coming up! 

THE GILDED ONES

Okay, we go from a mediocre book to one of the best I've read in a long time. The Gilded Ones is AMAZING. It's YA fantasy and it's better than most out there. 

I'm going to try to set the stage without revealing anything. This book unravels secret after secret as it goes along, so I'm likely going to end up not saying too much. Just read it. It is so good. 

The setting is a world called Otera. There are 4 different regions that mimic Earth. The Northerners are pale, frequently blondes and redheads. One of them speaks with a vaguely Irish accent. Another is named Katya. You get it. The Easterners are basically East Asian, though there is also reference to a mid-Easterner, which is Middle Eastern. The Westerners sound mostly to me like Central and South American Indians. And the Southerners are black. They're ruled by an emperor, whose capital is in the northern part of the Southern area. 

The religion of the book follows a single god called Oyomo. The scriptures are very misogynist. Women come of age at 16 after a special ceremony in which it's determined if they're pure or not. Pure women start wearing masks then. These masks cover from their forehead to under their noses, though they can also cover the entire face. Women are taught to be subservient from birth and the entire society is basically horrible for that. 

But what makes it worse is the purity ritual. The girls are bled. Pure girls have red blood, but some of them bleed...gold. Like literal molten gold. Things are crafted from their blood and it's frequently sold. These girls are viewed as demons and face the Death Mandate. 

So in the Northern town of Irfut, our heroine lives. Deka is the girl on the cover. You can tell by my description of the regions that she doesn't exactly look like a Northerner and naturally the Northerners are incredibly racist. Deka's mother was Southern and her father Northern. But Deka's got bigger problems than racism because she bleeds gold. Thankfully, she is fetched by a woman in the employ of the emperor. He's creating an army of the golden-blooded women to fight the monsters that are preying on the people of Otera.

The golden-blooded, called alaki, are all female. They're stronger and faster than humans. They can be killed, but it isn't easy. Some are more easy to kill, but others can be killed over and over until their method of true death is found. 

Deka journeys from her hometown to the capital in the south, where she begins her training for the emperor's alaki army. As each chapter unfolds, more is learned about the alaki, about the history of the world, and about Deka herself. 

I'm not going to say anything else, because I can't without spoilers. But the world-building here was fantastic. It's a fantasy world, but it's not that different from the real world. There are mystical creatures that sound awesome, but many echo natural or mythical creatures. There's not really magic. A little bit maybe but in a different sense than the ways other fantasy writers use magic. That was one of the high points of the book to me. The magical aspects are unique. 

I do want to warn you though that this is not an easy book to read. There's torture, a lot of violence, girls with PTSD, off-screen rape, and loads of sexism. It's not gory but it doesn't pull its punches either.

I give this the highest possible recommendation if you like fantasy YA. I hope she's working on a sequel right now!

The Truth About Alice

The Truth About Alice comes from the same author as Moxie. It's also about small, high school football-obsessed Texas town. 

This one deals with a single rumor and how it grew viciously, life-destroyingly out of hand. 

If you want to read it, don't read any more of this review. I'm going to spoil everything. 

The book is mostly written from four different perspectives, not one of which is Alice's and she's the one the rumor is about. You finally get her point of view in the final chapter. 

The mess starts with a rumor. Elaine threw a party and Alice had sex with two boys (Brandon and Tommy) while she was there. Not long after, Brandon dies in a car accident because Alice was sexting him and it distracted him. Brandon being the #1 quarterback football hero of the town, everyone who just thought Alice was a slut before is now out for blood. 

So first we've got Elaine. Elaine is one of the most popular girls in school. She's a little different because she's curvy and she's definitely got issues with her body image, unlike your stereotypical popular girl with the perfect body. But she's also completely shallow and basically useless. 

Then there's Josh, who was Brandon's BFF. He's a boring jock guy. 

Kelsie was Alice's best friend but slowly dropped her after the slut rumors began. 

And finally, there's Kurt, who's the school genius/social outcast. 

Oh, and Alice. Alice has short hair and wears more formal clothes, like pencil skirts and open-toed sandals to school. Until she becomes the target and tries to hide in giant hoodies and jeans. 

I'll try to put together something of a timeline. So there's Elaine's party. Brandon is flirting with Alice and before the end of the party, he tells Josh and some of the girls that he and Tommy (a college student who went to their high school) both slept with Alice that night. 

Truth is, neither of them did. But Alice's rejection hurt Brandon's ego, so he lied about her, then let the rumor spin out of control. He admits this to Kurt, his next door neighbor and secret confidante. 

Alice becomes the school slut and is abandoned by everyone except Kurt, who's had a crush on her for ages. He overhears her asking for extra credit in a math class and offers to tutor her. 

Not long after school starts, Brandon's mother asks him to go to the store. He and Josh have been hanging out, drinking beers, but they're both used to drunk-driving so they go. In the car, Brandon becomes distracted by his phone and crashes. He's killed, Josh is injured. Josh ends up telling Brandon's mother that it was Alice who was texting Brandon. 

Truth is, Josh was jealous of Brandon's constant lineup of girls. Brandon went to text Alice and Josh grabbed the phone from him. That's what caused the accident. This tidbit is the only thing interesting from Josh's chapters. And he might be gay but that's never explored, only hinted at. 

Now everyone blames Alice for Brandon's death and the bullying gets worse. There's an entire stall in one of the girls' bathrooms dedicated to Alice graffiti. 

Kelsie contributes an abortion rumor to the mix. Now Kelsie's got a good secret to hide herself. Alice once didn't tell her the truth about messing around with an older guy. When Kelsie called her on it, Alice blamed Kelsie's being a virgin for Alice's unwillingness to talk about sexual things with her. So Kelsie was out to get herself some experience and had a fab 3-minute deflowering by Tommy (one of the guys rumored to have slept with Alice at the infamous party). Kelsie, whose mother is an obsessed Christian who demonstrates in front of women's clinics, got knocked up. And where does Mom take her? To the same clinic for an abortion. Kelsie blames Alice for all of this because she's a fucking moron. 

Meanwhile, Alice and Kurt are growing friendlier as their tutoring sessions continue. But it eventually comes out that he's known Brandon lied about what happened at the party the entire time and did nothing about it. She gets rightfully angry, but they make up and in her ending chapter, it's hinted they'll be a couple. 

This book is a fast read and it's well-written. It's probably also quite realistic, but that makes it honestly wholly unsatisfying. 

Elaine never gets any sort of lesson learned from her popular girl bullying. She's not an awful person, but she's not a good one either. 

Kelsie is truly a terrible friend. She'll never explain her secret to Alice, who will never fully understand the real reason her former BFF turned against her. Kelsie puts her own popularity ahead of Alice and I don't think she'll ever be any remotely like a good person unless someday she grows a backbone. The sad thing is, she's well-aware of this fact. 

Josh is just there. And he'll never tell the truth about what happened in the car. 

So literally none of the assholes ever get any sort of comeuppance. Not a thing. 

I do like Kurt, but it was kind of creepy that he had this big crush on Alice, used her bullying to get closer to her, then ended up actually getting to be with her. I think Alice deserves better than that. It's not that he's bad, but it still reads as opportunistic on his part. I think they should have been friends and that's it. Hinting that they'll be a couple disturbs me. 

Read this one if you like teen drama and don't mind not being at all satisfied with how anything comes out. But honestly, there are a lot better books out there.

MOXIE

I'm gonna do this one a little different because I watched the film version on Neflix before I read the book, and I feel both are worth discussing at the same time. 

The basic premise of Moxie is that a small town girl with an ex-Riot Grrrl for a mom gets fed up with the blatant sexism at her school and starts an anonymous feminist zine that she puts in the girls' bathrooms. This starts the Moxie revolution. 

The main characters of the book are decidedly Viv and her mom. Both have pale skin and long black hair and the girl on the cover doesn't exactly look white, but Viv is referred to as white later on in the book. Not sure what the point of making them look like they might not be 100% white only for it to be meaningless. In the movie, both characters are blonde. Initially, I wasn't sure about the change from dark to blonde, but Viv's looks have nothing to do with a non-white identity, so it honestly doesn't matter much if they're suddenly blondes. 

I'm going to come right out and say it: I loved the movie, but I only just really liked the book. The movie is actually better in almost every way except one, but that one is pretty fundamental. It's Viv and her mom. I found them so much better in the book. Movie Mom is pretty cool, but I don't like that she hides her new relationship from Viv. Book Mom doesn't do that. Movie Viv was okay, but I didn't like how she handled the relationship reveal or how she treated Seth during the dinner table fight. Those things don't happen in the book. Book Viv takes her time to come to terms with John, her mom's boyfriend, but that's mostly because she feels her mom can do better. She eventually accepts that he makes her mom happy, so she's okay with him by the end, though they're never actually shown interacting more than once or twice. But the relationship between Viv and her mom is at the core of both book and movie, and I really loved how close they're portrayed. The book shows it even more than the movie does. It's great. 

I'm just going to keep going with the characters. The next ones are Viv's maternal grandparents. They're typical Texas grandparents. Maybe a little more accepting. They're not in the movie at all, but they didn't add anything to the plot either, except maybe to show Viv as being dutiful. Viv's father died when she was a baby in the book, whereas in the movie, her parents appear to be divorced. That was a part of the movie that wasn't handled well. None of that was ever explained and it was part of the dinner table blowup scene. 

Claudia is Viv's best friend in both versions. Book Claudia is incredibly short and at least part Hispanic. Movie Claudia is tall and Chinese-American. Book Claudia is way less involved in the entire plot than Movie Claudia. Book Claudia only really gets involved after suffering from a sexual assault that the principal does nothing about. Movie Claudia's excuse to not get involved is her strict mother, but also just that she has different methods of doing things. She finally does get into it and ends up playing a major role. The relationship between Viv and Claudia was far stronger in the movie.

Then we've got new girl Lucy. In the book, she's half Latinx. In the movie, she's Afro-Latinx. Both girls are strong characters, but Book Lucy is far quieter and actually more like Movie Claudia. It's she, not Claudia, that's targeted by the principal as the founder of Moxie. It's she, not Claudia, that's worried about getting into college. So her book character got turned more into Claudia, while Movie Lucy took a few aspects of Book Lucy but then just exploded as her own character. Lucy was my favorite. She's strong, takes no shit, and she's a leader. It's too bad that she and the other supporting cast took a bit of a backseat during the latter part of the movie. Definitely my biggest criticism of the movie right there.

The other characters are similar yet different. Movie Soccer girls Kiera and Amaya were there, but in a lesser role. The whole scholarship battle wasn't in the book. The book had the addition of two other soccer players: Marisela and Jane. Marisela is a badass and I loved her few scenes. I think they took some of her and gave it to Lucy in the movie. At one point, Viv catches Marisela and Jane kissing, which they ask her to keep a secret. I wish that had been more dealt with but it just wasn't. The movie was definitely more LGBTQ-friendly. Book Viv's friends include Kaitlynn, Meg and Sara. Meg and Sara didn't really do anything so they weren't missed from the movie. Kaitlynn in the book doesn't do much either. Movie Kaitlynn is the large-chested girl who gets picked on for wearing a tank top. The dress code violator in the book was Sara. The girls also wore bathrobes in the book, whereas in the movie, they all came to school in tank tops as protest. The tank tops were definitely the better way to go. CJ, the trans girl, is a character that was added for the movie, which disappoints me, because I really wanted to know if she got the part she auditioned for. The movie never tells us! 

Emma the popular cheerleader is similar in both versions, though the book version is more driven and studious.

Mr. Davies in the book is a sexist asshat who retires at the end of the year. Mr. Davies in the movie at least came around to being very supportive. 

The asshole football players were the same in both, though their actions are different in both versions. I'll get into that later. 

The principal is one of the biggest differences. In the movie, she's a woman who never does a damn thing about the blatant sexism...why? Because she's lazy? It's never really addressed properly. The principal in the book is Mitchell Wilson's father. Mitchell Wilson, who is the quarterback and the worst of the football assholes. So at least that makes sense. Of course he's going to let his kid run wild in the school. There are multiple other administrators who also do nothing about anything. 

And finally, there's Seth Acosta, the romantic interest. Seth in the movie is someone Viv has known her whole life. He used to be short and goofy, but now he's grown into tall and sexy. But movie Seth's biggest characteristic is that he is genuinely a nice guy. He cares about women and everyone's rights. He's so sweet with Viv and really wants to do everything right when it comes to their relationship. He's one of the best teen romance leads I've seen in...well, ever. He's that awesome. And then there's Book Seth. Sigh. Book Seth is The New Boy. He's the son of two artists who moved from Austin and for some reason, he chooses Viv to help him learn the whole small Texas town thing. In the movie, it was obvious Seth had liked her for a while. In the book, it's never explained how she catches his eye. He's into non-mainstream music and dresses in black. He's the cool boy, the boy of Viv's daydreams. Yet honestly, you never learn much about him. You meet his parents but who in the world is Seth? You never learn. I had absolutely no attachment to him, except he does do the draw on your hands thing and that was genuinely cool. The worst thing about him though is that he doesn't fully support Viv with Moxie or feminism. She keeps having to explain stuff to him. He's not an awful character but too much of the book is spent on him and more should have been spent on the female cast. 

So that's the cast. Now for one of the other differences and that is the types of sexism shown in both. The movie had Mitchell harassing Lucy, the list, Jason and his sexist shirts, the dress code, and the football team being focused on too much while the girls' soccer team, which actually wins, is not. Then there was the rape accusation at the end. That accusation in the book was actually an attempted rape, but otherwise it was the book that had the more serious problems. Mitchell doesn't bother Lucy much, but the boys do play a game the girls call "bump 'n' grab." They bump into girls and then touch them in different places. Mitchell gets Claudia in a lesser-used hallway and actually fondles her breasts under her shirt and the school does nothing about it. The list turns into March Madness, where the boys pick hot junior and senior girls and basically do March Madness brackets for them until one girl "wins" most Fuckable. The escalation of the events from the movie to the book (because I experienced them in that order) made the book almost seem unbelievable. Yet I'm sure there are schools where these things happen. That's the sad part. 

Neither book nor movie is perfect. The diversification of the movie cast makes Viv as the leader come across on the white savior side. This wouldn't have happened if they hadn't sidelined the supporting cast. Viv's leadership in the book is also much more toned down. Kiera comes up with one of the Moxie events and Lucy does another. The walkout idea is actually Emma's. So if the movie had taken the book's idea and spread around the ideas between the supporting cast, I think that would have balanced things out a bit more. And you know, they could have just spent some more time with the supporting cast, too. But overall, the movie does beat the book. Both of them are worth seeing/reading. They're just not above criticism.