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My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪.5
Genre: Fantasy
The Song of Achilles is a retelling of Achilles’ life as told in The Iliad. It focuses on the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus as they meet, fall for each other, and go to battle in Troy. We know all along that this story won’t have a happy ending and the wonderfully organic unfolding of their feelings for each other made it all the more painful to become immersed in their world and their story.
The source material for this story is an epic, but it felt to me like making this adaptation could have been an opportunity to stray from that format. The parts of the book that were character-driven were beautiful, but it seemed like nothing really happened for the majority of it and then there was a lot of rushed action at the end. In my opinion, it could have been shorter and more focused and packed a greater punch.
I enjoy Greek mythology and many pieces of this story were familiar to me. I enjoyed getting to reimagine them through the lens of this romance. Achilles and Patroclus were flawed and often frustrating, but I found myself rooting for them nonetheless and the ending absolutely gutted me.
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