Book Review: Goddess of Yesterday
Dec. 3rd, 2023 08:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerBoth rachelmanija and asakiyume recently wrote rave reviews of Caroline B. Cooney’s Goddess of Yesterday, so of course I had to read it, and they are quite right! This book is fantastic.
One of Cooney’s great strengths is her ability to create a vivid sense of setting, and this is perhaps never more prominent than in this book set in the Greek islands just before the Trojan War. Our heroine, Anaxandra, grew up on an island so small that she has never seen stairs until she is taken as a hostage to Siphnos. When she sees her first statue, she believes it is a child turned to stone by Medusa.
(Medusa is an ongoing motif in this story. There is an absolutely fantastic scene where Anaxadra scares off some pirates - too late to save anyone else, alas! - by putting an octopus on her head and rising out of the water to curse them.)
The book does an incredible job evoking a sense of sheer alienness. It’s not just that Anaxandra has never seen glass, or horseback riding, or writing. It suffuses her entire worldview: her sense of how one tries to bargain with the cruel gods, or the way that she simply accepts that war captives become slaves, even while striving to avoid that fate herself. The inexorableness of fate. The fact that this inexorableness spurs her not to passive fatalism but to feats of heroism.
Goddess of Yesterday is also simply an exciting, fast-paced story, with a delightful heroine. Anaxandra is brave, curious, strong-willed, a survivor who prides herself on her toughness - but tough without being callous. And Cooney does an excellent job giving not only her heroine but many other women in the story something to do. They are constrained, but they are not passive: they try to influence their lives in whatever small way they can.
An incredible book. Highly recommended if you like Mary Renault (but always wanted more focus on the women) or Megan Whalen Turner’s Queen’s Thief series.
rachelmanija and asakiyume recently wrote rave reviews of Caroline B. Cooney’s Goddess of Yesterday, so of course I had to read it, and they are quite right! This book is fantastic.One of Cooney’s great strengths is her ability to create a vivid sense of setting, and this is perhaps never more prominent than in this book set in the Greek islands just before the Trojan War. Our heroine, Anaxandra, grew up on an island so small that she has never seen stairs until she is taken as a hostage to Siphnos. When she sees her first statue, she believes it is a child turned to stone by Medusa.
(Medusa is an ongoing motif in this story. There is an absolutely fantastic scene where Anaxadra scares off some pirates - too late to save anyone else, alas! - by putting an octopus on her head and rising out of the water to curse them.)
The book does an incredible job evoking a sense of sheer alienness. It’s not just that Anaxandra has never seen glass, or horseback riding, or writing. It suffuses her entire worldview: her sense of how one tries to bargain with the cruel gods, or the way that she simply accepts that war captives become slaves, even while striving to avoid that fate herself. The inexorableness of fate. The fact that this inexorableness spurs her not to passive fatalism but to feats of heroism.
Goddess of Yesterday is also simply an exciting, fast-paced story, with a delightful heroine. Anaxandra is brave, curious, strong-willed, a survivor who prides herself on her toughness - but tough without being callous. And Cooney does an excellent job giving not only her heroine but many other women in the story something to do. They are constrained, but they are not passive: they try to influence their lives in whatever small way they can.
An incredible book. Highly recommended if you like Mary Renault (but always wanted more focus on the women) or Megan Whalen Turner’s Queen’s Thief series.
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Date: 2023-12-03 01:39 pm (UTC)And the fact that she's tough without being callous was something I noticed and really appreciated, too--and same with the real-ness and interestingness of the other female characters (all the characters, honestly, but it's women characters who often get short shrift).
And yeah: the fact that the inexorableness of fate doesn't induce passivity. A Lesson For Our Times.
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Date: 2023-12-04 02:56 am (UTC)The inexorable fate that spurs the hero to great exertion rather than passivity is so ancient Greek. All the heroes seem to have fated deaths laid upon them, and they're all running around trying to earn as much glory as possible before they're shot in the heel or whatever.
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Date: 2023-12-03 06:47 pm (UTC)How about Helen of Troy? I especially liked how that didn't come across as misogynist because there were so many women and girls who were all different and had their own agency. (CASSANDRA.) And how to us "Helen of Troy" is just her name, but to Anaxandra the moment where she becomes "of Troy" is a horrifying shock.
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Date: 2023-12-04 03:15 am (UTC)Cassandra is such a tragedy. She always is, but her isolation in this one is so vivid - especially the moment where Anaxandra goes up to talk to her, intending to befriend her, but then gets the creepy-crawlies and wants to flee like everyone else. It would be hard being friends with a prophetess! You never know when she's going to say something horrible that you absolutely did not want to know about the future! The bit where Cassandra says Anaxandra's parents will never find her, and Anaxandra asks if she might ever find them, and we never do get an answer to that...
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