Rating: WARTY!
Generally speaking, I'm not a fan of ward-winning novels, but this one, which won the Josette Frank Award in 2003, started out really well and I enjoyed it, but as soon as the main character took up residence in the palace of King Menelaus, the story fell completely flat and became a tiresome read. It is aimed at middle-grade children, so we shouldn't expect too much of it, but I think children have a right to expect enough from a novel, and I felt that this quite simply did not deliver. Even the title was a bit of a downer, which struck me as strange.
Some people have described this as an historical novel and it is, technically speaking, but it's also one of those novels written for children which puts the child at the pivot of events, and I typically find those to be the disingenuous and annoying braggarts of the literary world (whether written for children or for adults for that matter).
The story is supposed to be that of Anaxandra, who we join at the age of six, the daughter of a minor pirate lord of some non-entity of an Aegean island. She is a devotee of Medusa, and often prays to her for help and guidance, although Medusa was not actually a god. She was one of the Gorgons, a race of monsters. Why anyone would pray to such a creature is unexplained in this novel. This young girl is taken as tribute (so she believes) by king Nikander (note that my spellings may be off because I listened to an audio book, so I have no idea how the author spelled these names in the printed version), and grows up to middle-grade age with the royal family as a companion to his handicapped daughter Callisto, but his small island is raided by pirates who slaughter and destroy. Anaxandra manages to survive this and at one point amusingly frightens away some pirates by putting an octopus on her head and pretends that she is a displeased Medusa come to wreak havoc upon them. These pirates are pretty dumb, let's face it, and so they take off, and Anaxandra buries her dead king.
Just when she thinks hope is lost, King Menelaus of Sparta arrives with his fleet, and fearful of being taken into slavery, Anaxandra pretends she is Nikander's dead daughter Callisto. Menelaus adopts her into his own family, perhaps because they both share red hair (a color which is brought up with nauseating frequency). For me, here is where the story became uninteresting and fell completely flat. Contrary to popular consciousness, Helen (of Troy), wife of Menelaus, is portrayed not such much as a raging beauty as she is a royal bitch, and Paris is portrayed as a complete fop more worthy of being named Narkissos than Paris.
The problem with this part of this novel is that it's taken to the level of caricature, and so was as uninteresting to me. It lacked all and any attempt at nuance. As such, it wasn't entertaining at all. This is where the story became tedious to me, with page after page of commentary on what a bitch Helen was and what a poseur Paris was. It was tiresome, unimaginative, and uninventive, and it was at this point that i quit reading it. How it won an award, I do not know because Anaxandra had so many opportunities to become a really powerful character, and the author let all of them slip through her fingers.
Additionally, Anaxandra was one of the most emotionally dead characters I've ever encountered. There was no concern on her part for example, from the fact that she had been forced from her original home, or from seeing King Nikander, of whom she was very fond, die along with - evidently, her adopted sister Callisto, or form seeing her adopted mother, who was very kind to Callisto, being taken into slavery by the pirates. We never even got a description of her adopted mom's grief from losing both her husband and her daughter. At one point Anaxandra did consider going into the palace during the raid to get to Callisto, but her effort was half-hearted at best, and her complete loss of interest in Callisto's fate thereafter was shameful. Could the author not at least have had her find her sister and bury her too?
It was this complete lack of a clue about how real people children react and behave coupled with the sheer boredom later, which turned me off this book. How can any author,m even by accident, make the story of Helen and Paris boring?! I've never heard of the Josette Frank Award, but I have to say that standards must be low if this one won it. I can't recommend it.
