Lord of the Silver Bow

“Make no mistake, I want you to die. But this is his night. Tonight he is greater than Kings. So you live.”

I am absolutely blown away. This was spectacular. It had no right to be as good as it is.

This'll just be me raving about this Troy “retelling” which, honestly, it's not really. The Troy we know is coming, with twists, but this is essentially a prequel except that there is not one thing that happens in this book that you can know to expect from familiarity with the Iliad (besides that certain characters appear, like Odyssey and Priam).

We primarily follow three main POVs with a few minor POVs scattered throughout - Helikaon, Andromache, and Argurios- and I absolutely LOVED all three of them. They are immediately so well drawn, and so are all the side characters. There's a passage where a character is introduced for three pages and then I was moved emotionally by their actions.There was even a romance I was very invested in. Character work - superb

The action- superb. There was not a ton of action, but the action we got was incredibly exciting.

The politics- Refreshing to get Troy's side of the politics here. Agamemnon is mentioned, and tensions are rising, but most of the drama here is between factions within Troy and their competing interests, and that was very well done.

The prose was immensely readable. I could read 50 pages without even thinking about it. The way the book plays with what you know about the Illiad while being entirely its own thing and also not relying on people having prior knowledge was excellent.

This book made me tear up twice, which I'm pretty sure historical fiction has never done. This book is just excellent and I'm annoyed that I've owned it for years and wouldn't have picked it up for years still if it wasn't for an impromptu buddy read. This is my first Gemmell but not my last!

10/10

Gave up about half way. Not only is the plot is plodding but it introduces two news characters. Helikaon is a rather dull one dimensional character. And Andromache isn't much better.
Also, the choice of telling the story through the perspectives of about thirty characters, of which about five were recurring, meant that there wasn't much of a story at all.