Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I care a lot about Achilles and Patroclus. My honors thesis topic, which I've been working on for the past seven months, is "Representations of Achilles and Patroclus in Post-Homeric Literature." So I'm pretty heavily invested here. I hate this book. I wanted to like it, I really did. But I can't, because it fails in every possible way to live up to its source material. And maybe it's not fair to blame someone for failing to be as good as Homer, but hey, I think you're asking for it if you write a novel based on the Iliad. Now, obviously when someone adapts a story, it's not going to turn out like the original. Details will be changed, different things will be emphasized, perspectives will shift. This is fine. This is how literature works. But that doesn't mean all adaptations are created equal. Madeleine Miller has made several choices in this novel that I don't like. I feel that it was unnecessary to turn Thetis into a psychotic bitch, and that to portray Patroclus as an incompetent warrior does a disservice to a character whose charge at the walls of Troy was only stopped when Apollo came down onto the battlefield and punched him the head. No, Patroclus is not as skilled as Achilles, but then NO ONE IS. That's what "Best of the Achaeans" means. Menoetius' utter lack of likable characteristics was similarly unwarranted. But the worst thing about this book is the characterization of Achilles. Homer's Achilles is a deeply flawed hero. He's a brilliant fighter, but he's arrogant, petulant, violent, and selfish. He would be completely unsympathetic, except for the fact that he is also capable of extraordinary tenderness and compassion. His tragedy is that all of his emotions, his rage, his love, his pain, are larger than life and impossible for him to control. He is caught between his half-divine nature and his mortality, and it torments him. Madeleine Miller's Achilles is a cardboard cutout. He's beautiful and brilliant, but it's all glitter and no substance. The complexity of his agony is absent. None of his actions seem to have sufficient motivation, because he is completely two-dimensional. His love for Patroclus is therefore unconvincing, and the emotional arc of the book fails to deliver its catharsis. To cap my irritation, large chunks of the last quarter of this novel consist of paraphrased scenes from the Iliad that have been watered down and simplified. The rendition of the embassy scene in Book 9 was particularly egregious. Gone is the intricate thematic interplay, the questioning of the heroic code, the search for the truth of human nature. What's left over is...really not worth remarking upon. I think the love story of Achilles and Patroclus is beautiful, but this is not that story.