I suspect I’m not the only person to have this sort of reaction – when I said that I was reading Lavinia on Twitter, somebody responded to say that it was their favourite piece of classical reception, especially those parts which didn’t retell the Aeneid. But from my personal vantage point as a reader, I find these sorts of works vaguely unsatisfactory. It’s one of the reasons I’ve yet to pick up Madeline Miller’s Song of Achilles, despite the critical acclaim it has received, and it’s one of the reasons that it took the SFF conference to shame me into picking up Lavinia at long last, despite the warm welcome it received among classicists. This is, I hasten to add, an extremely personal thing, and I don’t mean for one minute to suggest that texts which try to rewrite or write alongside classical texts are a bad thing – that the Song of Achilles won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2012 and Lavinia won the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel in 2009 sort of undermines that line of argument anyway. Second, I have a really uneasy relationship with classical reception books set in actual classical periods. The Tombs of Atuan in particular formed a far larger part of my childhood’s imaginative backdrop than it perhaps should have done. First, I love Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea series. There are two things I should fess up before we begin.
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