Beyond Selidor

How long have you got?

Just joking, really, but it might help to know a bit more context. Basically, when I'm looking for Iliad retellings, I'm generally looking for stories that a) focus on the female characters and b) focus on the terrible consequences of violent, patriarchal honour culture on those within such cultures who have no power (women, children, enslaved people, etc). Briseis is my favourite character from the Iliad, but I don't like retellings that depict her relationship with Achilles as being a sort of swoony YA-style starcrossed lovers romance.

At some point, a bunch of people on Tumblr recommended The Song of Achilles to me as an Iliad retelling that did the sorts of things I wanted, and I think at least one person described it as a story that 'did right by Briseis.' However, nothing could be further from the truth. The Song of Achilles is probably better described as a novel that applies slash fanfic tropes to the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus, with a lyrical, literary fiction writing style. As in fanfic, this results in the entire world of the novel being warped to revolve around the couple and their relationship. Briseis is relegated to a sort of squeeing cheerleader for the Achilles/Patroclus relationship, and the fact that Achilles literally acquires her as spoils of war after he's invaded her city and killed her family is reframed as being a benevolent act to protect her from the abuses of other, worse, invading men (and Achilles and Patroclus acquire a sort of gaggle of captured women and girls over the course of the novel whom they 'protect' in a similar way).

If you're going into the novel as a huge Briseis fan, all of the above is already enough to make you detest it, but even if you don't care about Briseis, there's a whole bunch of other stuff which I found massively unappealling.

Firstly, Miller has to warp a lot of the original source material to make it fit with the sort of tropey m/m romance she wants to write. And so Achilles' mother is suddenly randomly homophobic (in a twenty-first-century way) so as to provide tension and drama for her son's 'forbidden' romance with another man. And so Patroclus — who, in the Iliad, is a competent warrior with an invading army — is suddenly someone who doesn't fight, is horrified by violence, and horrified that Achilles is going to have to kill people, and is good at it. (Even though the two of them were raised together and trained as soldiers from childhood, and even though for this reason Patroclus obviously knows that Achilles is a very competent fighter.) I found all this extremely enraging — it was as if Miller needed to remove everything from the original source material in order to make her romance comprehensible and her couple sympathetic, so she took away everything about the context and characterisation that might possibly cause readers not to empathise with her tragic, doomed lovers.

So basically, if you ship Achilles/Patroclus and like the idea of them written as a soft, sympathetic romance with both fanfic tropes and lush, lyrical language, you will probably find the book appealling. If all the problems I've laid out above are things that are likely to bother you, you will probably dislike the book as much as I did.

I hope that helps to answer your question.