Troy by Adele Geras

So the back of the book tells me all the prizes that Troy by Adele Geras has won or been shortlisted for: ALA Best Book for Young Adults, Publisher's Weekly Best Children's Book of the Year, A Carnegie Medal Finalist, etc. Before reading I was highly impressed. As I've been teaching The Odyssey and working my way through The Iliad and The War that Killed Achilles by Caroline Alexander, I though that Troy would fit right in. And for the most part, it was a pleasant little excursion into the personal lives of some rather unimportant inhabitants of Ilium, Priam's town, who nonetheless interact with all the notables - Priam, Hector, Paris, Andromache, and Helen. But my god if the writing didn't make me want to strangle myself.

I've read some horrible writing recently - the worst being Angelogy by Danielle Trussoni, perhaps the most poorly written book of the new century. The one thing the poorly written books I've read seem to have in common is that their idea is original and engaging but the execution destroys the value the once-shining original idea ever had. And I think, rather unfortunately, that Troy fits the bill as well. Geras has created some likable characters with enough depth to keep them engaging. The story centers around young Xanthe, who is the nursemaid to Hector and Andromache's young son Astyanax. She falls in love with a young soldier named Alastor when Aphrodite appears and makes her smitten. Aphrodite goes on to complicate things in the way that only the capricious Greek gods can by forcing Alastor to fall in love with Xanthe's sister, Marpessa. Shenanigans ensue.

But the shenanigans, which are artfully setup to play out in the waning months of the ten-year war, are just so annoyingly described. Take this comment from the scene in which Paris kills his son in a case of mistaken identity: "I never knew I had a son. Can you believe that? And no sooner does he announce himself than I kill him. A terrible sin...the worst sin in the world to kill your son." (214) Wow! Really? You think? Way to sum it up for the readers there Ms. Geras.

I know that this book is written for the younger reader in mind, but I think the simplicity with which Ms. Geras describes the life of her characters is insulting. Part of learning to become a good reader is being able to tell a character's emotions without having them announce it in the easiest terms possible. After all, most humans don't go around saying, "I'm mad because my boss blamed me for something that was caused by someone else. And that is why I feel terrible." Frankly, the reason we have therapy is so that people can spend years and thousands learning to say things like that, but Ms. Geras rarely lets readers make any inferences at all. I think we need to let teen readers understand inferences. Too much concrete thinking leads to simplicity, and we could all use a good dose of intellectual complexity in our lives.