Oh boy though, this book was not it.
Let me start with the positives since I don’t want to bash a book someone took the time and energy to write. Firstly, and this is what attracted me to buy the book in the first place, it was very refreshing to see Atalanta being portrayed in her own dedicated story. She’s often forgotten in the mainstream (sometimes even completely removed from the Argonauts epic) so I was happy to read her story from her point of view.
At first the book started off quite strongly. The sequences from Atalanta’s birth and being adopted by a bear to her being included in Artemis’ band of nymphs and huntresses were very nice to read and set the tone of the novel. I do wish it had lasted longer as we didn’t have much time to linger in Atalanta’s youth and what would become of her character traits. Little did I know that this would become a recurrent issue.
Overall, there’s a very good story in here obviously. The greatest huntress in Ancient Greece joins the greatest road trip (ahem, boat trip) in Ancient Greece with a bunch of its greatest heroes. She’ll need to make her place in an uncomfortably macho environment and prove her doubters wrong. The idea evoked in the novel that her being forgotten in some of the historians recounting of the Argonautica was a wilful omission to avoid having to credit a woman was a very good concept!
Well, here come the cons and the negatives now. Unfortunately I have quite a few.
Starting off, I thought most of the characters in the novel were dull, one note and were not at all well characterised by the author. Yes, unfortunately this includes Atalanta as well. It’s actually almost impressive how you can take the cast of the Argonaut epic which includes legendary heroes such Atalanta herself, Heracles, Orpheus or even Jason and make them so boring. Granted, this is also due to the fact that it is a very big cast of characters so some will need to be put to the side. But how is it that Atalanta herself was so dull? Despite the fact that we’re reading from her point of view, she barely has any interior dialogue or inner reflexions on her situation so it becomes very difficult to connect with her.
This actually extends to her romantic relationships in the novel. In the first place, why does Atalanta need to get in a relationship with the two first guys she ever meets? Then, for the relationships themselves, they just felt very unbelievable and boring. There’s barely any chemistry or build up there. This meant that her relationship with Meleager felt quite forced, when it probably would’ve been more interesting to make them friends. His death is rushed and is just a plot tool to make Atalanta go somewhere else. Even the build up of Atalanta having to face the fact that she broke her vows with a married man by meeting his wife later isn’t fully fleshed out when it could’ve been a very interesting confrontation.
A larger issue here is that I personally think that the Argonaut story in itself is not the most interesting, especially when viewed from Atalanta’s perspective since she doesn’t end up having an active role in retrieving the fleece in the first place. So the novel reads like a road trip with a few stops along the way, but with no climax at the pivotal point of the quest. Then we end up following Atalanta to Meleager’s home to fight a boar which felt jarring in how rushed it was pushed into the story.
Honestly, this was an issue throughout the whole novel. The pacing was just way off. It’s much too rapid and barely ever get any time to sit with our characters, to get to know them, to enjoy the moment and the atmosphere. There’s also barely any descriptions of the places they visit when it should’ve been this grandiose quest! The worst part of this is that we never get Atalanta’s inner dialogue when faced with discovering Greek cities and society for the first time. She was literally raised by a bear and then a ruthless goddess, and she doesn’t have anything to say? I guess that only left us with the poorly written dialogue from the poorly written characters.
This was still an easy read and I’m happy Atalanta got her spotlight, but it was a letdown overall unfortunately.
by bernabeth