The Song of Achilles

I have never read the Iliad, and I thought it might be fun to delve into a modern treatment of the story. This book had so many great reviews that it seemed worth buying. However, I stopped reading the novel when I was about 30% of the way through. By this time it became clear that the author was going to make the romance between Patroclus and Achilles the centerpiece of the book. For instance as teens, Achilles and Patroclus spend two or three years in the wilderness with a centaur who is supposed to be instructing Achilles in the art of war… except he doesn’t. Patroclus is not supposed to be in the wilderness with them, but he tags along anyway. This means that Patroclus himself has the opportunity to learn the art of war from this great centaur who taught Heracles how to fight, but Patroclus doesn’t either. It appears that the only reason these two were with centaur in the wilderness for a couple years was to allow the author to crate a bucolic love nest for the boys. And for unexplained reasons, Achilles’ mother, Thetis, seems to have always hated Patroclus. Again from a Romance-novel point-of-view, her intense animosity seems to exist only to create a “forbidden love” situation between Patroclus and Achilles. It all seemed so contrived.