Had she really thought I would not know him? I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.

It's very clear that The Song of Achilles is written by a talented author and thoroughly well-researched historian, however the novel did not entirely hold up for me. I found my mind wandering through a narrator for whom I did not feel particularly strong. The story is very simplistic in its nature: Achilles and Patroclus meet as children, grow up together, fall in crazy adolescent love, and then The Iliad happens.

I found the first half of the novel to be intriguing, though with little plot to drive it other than the romance, I found that neither protagonist was captivating enough to be taken by. I didn't think the characters of Achilles or Patroclus were strong enough to carry a novel on their own.

Miller's prose is gorgeous, it's entirely quotable and lovely and it served the story well. I don't know if a first-person narrative is the choice I would have made, but she executed it as gracefully as possible, with a narrator like Patroclus (who never seemed compelling enough to entice or explain the depth's of Achilles' love?)

The introduction of Odysseus was nicely handled (and very needed) however, I found the war to be drawn out and tedious, with very little sense of cohesiveness. In the event that Achilles and Patroclus were to be at the center of the novel, then Miller needed to find a way to tell the story of The Iliad without worrying about representing all the subtle nuances of the Trojan War. Too often there were off-putting sentences vaguely mentioning someone who was related to someone else who died or did a thing that doesn't really matter to this story, but mattered in The Iliad. It broke apart the cohesion of the story for me. In all great fanfiction (which, to be fair, this kind of is) the author does not need to retell us the plot of the source, instead greater liberties could have been taken with individualizing the plot for Miller's purposes. I didn't need a scholarly recap, I needed a stronger love story.

Odysseus, though. I really dug him.