The Song of Achilles frustrated me like almost no other book. I wanted to love it. I expected to love it. I’m a queer person who loves classics and has read the Iliad three times, so you’d think this would be the book for me.

I have three major issues with this book, and I’ll go through them in order. Possible spoilers below.

1) The complete misrepresentations of how people regarded sexuality in Ancient Greece. If you didn’t already know: the Ancient Greeks didn’t have a concept of being “gay” or “straight” as we think of it now. Adult men were expected to sleep with both women (their wife) and men (either slaves or boys, who were probably mostly teenagers—this was called pederasty and was partly about showing the younger men/boys what it meant to be a Greek citizen. Rome had a very different approach to this, though both cultures basically forbade adult male citizens from being bottoms).

So where do Achilles and Patroclus fit into this? They’re both free adult men, and while Achilles is higher socially, they’re both important warriors. Since all we see in the Iliad is that they’re very close and we know nothing about their relative ages or their sex lives, people have been speculating about them for the last three millennia. Read Plato’s Symposium if you don’t believe me. But basically, if we’re treating them as a couple, the anomaly is not that they’re both men but that they’re so equal in that relationship. THAT is the thing that should have been explored in this book. It could have looked at how the characters conceptualize their relationship in relation to the social norms of the day. Instead we get twenty-first-century homophobia, especially from Achilles’ mother Thetis, a literal goddess who would know perfectly well that even Zeus slept with men. So why is she acting like a modern Republican mom? It lacks imagination, and I’m not interested.

2) The weird fetishization. Look. The stuff I just discussed comes from looking at this book in relation to history and other literature, and not all readers will be aware of that, which is totally fine. But even without that, this book made me extremely uncomfortable. Even though every single character in this book is from the Mediterranean, Achilles for some reason looks like an English prince. He’s blonde and much lighter-skinned than everyone else. Why? Because his mother is a goddess? Does that mean the gods are not just white but in fact Very White? Yikes.

Patroclus narrates the book in first person, which is already weird considering what happens to him, but it somehow makes the descriptions even worse. There are food metaphors to describe people’s appearances all over the place, and the descriptions of Achilles as a child are DEEPLY uncomfortable. At some point I believe it says he was “still plump with youth”? THEY ARE BOTH CHILDREN. Why is he being described like this?! I could come up with other examples, but I really don’t want to. I’d think I was nitpicking on this, except for...

3) The author/the fandom. Madeline Miller, author of the Song of Achilles and also Circe, does actually have a classics degree. She’s also straight, white, and American. I think that’s relevant here. I’m really glad if other people find joy in this book. I am. But I can’t get over the fact that this is an adult woman writing prepubescent CHILDREN in sexualized ways. I can’t get over the fact that this is a straight woman projecting her ideas of gayness and homophobia into a culture that didn’t have those concepts. I can’t get over the fact that this is a white woman writing her characters (who aren’t technically POC but whom she certainly treats that way) with endless food metaphors. And I don’t want to hate this book on the basis of who the author is, but the fact is that if the author were a gay man I would read some of the more problematic aspects in a different way and assume he was working through his own stuff. That doesn’t seem to be the case here.

I also can’t blame the author for the fandom, but the fandom really frustrates me, and the seeds for that are all in the book itself. If you look for fan art of the Song of Achilles, you will find dark-skinned Patroclus admiring light-skinned, light-haired Achilles. But arguably worse than that is the constant woobification of Patroclus. Presumably mostly because he’s gay and because this book constantly says that he can’t fight (directly contradicting the Iliad, but whatever), the fandom has collectively decided that Patroclus is a sweet cinnamon roll too pure for this world. HE IS A WAR CRIMINAL. HE IS A MASS MURDERER. I actually love this character because even without knowing any details, he and Achilles have a beautiful relationship. It’s inspired queer people for thousands of years. But that doesn’t negate the fact that Patroclus is a very good warrior who kills dozens or maybe even hundreds of people and that Achilles is even worse. Why can’t we accept that? Why do we have to pretend that these characters are somehow morally pure while also shoving them into modern ideas of what it means to be gay?

I don’t fault anyone who likes this book. It’s mostly well-written and I have a lot of friends who love it. But for me, the bad outweighs the good, and I’d say even the truly awful Troy: Fall of a City did a better job with these characters.