Get Lost in Literature

  "The hairs stood on the back of my neck. All who were wise feared the god Apollo's wrath, silent as sunlight, deadly as plague." Circe is born to the sun god Helios and the nymph Perse. As far as goddesses go, she is unremarkable in every way; no beauty, no powers, and the insufferable voice of a mortal. She is the shame of her family and seems destined to remain so... Until the day comes when she realizes she can use herbs to bend life to her will. Circe isn't just a goddess, she's a witch and like most witches she must be punished for it and is sentenced to exile by Zeus and her own father. In college I had The Odyssey and The Iliad as required reading for a literature class that I had thought I'd enjoy taking at the time I enrolled in it... Spoiler alert, I finished neither the story nor the class. Thankfully Madeline Miller managed to write a Greek epic that was told in relative time lapse, meaning just because a story spans a thousand years doesn'...

  "This is how we sometimes lose people: not all at once, but little by little, like the wind blowing specks of pollen from a flower." The Land of Lost Things is the long-awaited sequel to The Book of Lost Things. The Book of Lost Things is one of my favorite books and is located on my Top Ten Books to Get Lost on a Deserted Island With list. Having never reviewed The Book of Lost Things , I feel compelled to tell you a little about it first. The Book of Lost Things is about a boy named David; his mother dies and his father remarries. Increasingly unhappy with his homelife, that now includes an infant half-brother, he falls deeper into the stories that bring him comfort... Until he accidentally opens the door to Elsewhere. In a world beyond his own, he finds fairytales and monsters reminiscent of The Brothers Grimm . I know certain adults have the compulsion for lumping all fantasy novels in with YA, but this book was not aimed at young adults. This book is a coming-of-age...

“It was not that he was feckless, more that he had simply not been around the day they handed out feck.”― Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys Charles Nancy is an unlucky sort of fellow; he prefers to be called Charles or Charlie but everyone calls him Fat Charlie, whether he likes it or not because that was the name his father gave him. With a wedding on the horizon, Rosie thinks it's time for Fat Charlie to start mending those old embarrassing bridges and invite his family to the wedding. Unable to say no, Charlie reaches out to Mrs. Higgler, a family friend who might know how to contact his old man... But he's too late. Mr. Nancy is dead and Mrs. Higgler's got news for Charlie. His father wasn't just a trickster, he was trickster God and Charlie has a long-lost brother who communicates through spiders... This book started out laugh out loud funny. I loved the glimpse into what an ancient God's idea of parenting would be, and those parenting skills then topped by the peculiar...

  "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." The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller, is a retelling of Homer's Iliad . The story is narrated by Patroclus, a young prince who is nothing that a prince should be, undersized and seemingly untalented in every way, he begins his life as his father's disappointment. After another child dies, Patroclus is sentenced to exile; sent to live out the rest of his childhood in King Peleus' household as an orphan being trained for war.  Young prince Achilles, is Patroclus' polar opposite. The son of King Peleus and the sea nymph Thetis, he is his father's honor and the pride of his kingdom. He is beautiful, bold and brilliant, destined by Fate to be "the best of the Greeks," doted on by all who meet him. Everyone wants to be his friend, but Achilles only has eyes for one...