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I tried, but I couldn't move beyond page 133.

While I can appreciate that Geras is introducing the myths of the Trojan War to young readers, I fault her for not making it her own. I have read the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Fall of Troy, and the Aeneid, and this story just felt like a less-interesting retelling. I couldn't get invested in either the story of the three servant girls or the re-told events of the Trojan War. There just wasn't enough of a focus.

The chapters are jolting--very short, skipping from one vantage point to another and moving from one setting to another. There's no time to be invested in anybody, and I was left just not caring, which was why I abandoned this book before getting halfway through. There were times when I was interested in the picture of Paris as a slimy man or Helen as a bit of a bimbo or Hector as a man struggling with his love for his wife Andromache and his attraction to Helen, but again, the chapters were far too jumpy to maintain a train of narrative. Perhaps that's the nature of trying to tackle an epic with a huge catalog of characters.

And the gods--well, they, too, were uninteresting. They were just the same old gods, without much originality of interpretation. Geras takes them too literally, showing Venus whenever someone is falling in love or about to make love. Or even worse, she has Cupid strike one of her characters with an arrow. Talk about hackneyed. Maybe I've read too much about them and have lost interest, but bringing us into contact with Hephaestus or Mars just isn't enough. You've got to do more with them.