Book Review: Helen of Sparta

This was the third and final title I got for free from Amazon during my prime membership trial and I was drawn to it because of the title like a lot of people were like the editor at Amazon (wait they have editors working with these books?). She wrote along the lines of "everyone knows her as Helen of Troy so why Sparta?" but actually, every story says that Helen came from Sparta, she's only associated with Troy because of her abduction. A story that makes that distinction from the start sounded interesting so why not check it out?

Helen of Sparta by Amalia Carosella

  

Book Review: Nobody's Princess and Nobody's Prize

As is a running theme on this blog, there are some books that have been on my to read list for entirely too long and it's just because I can't get a hold of them and I don't have the budget to blind buy. A lot of times they fall off after a while, I can't remember why I put them on in the first place or the summary starts to sound more stale but this one never did since it's about Helen of Sparta/Troy and, well I'm not named after her but I am interested in the legend*. There aren't as many stories about the Trojan War as there are about other parts of Greek mythology and Helen is always portrayed as either "madonna or whore," and innocent woman who is kidnapped and may-or-may-not have Stockholm Syndrome or someone who willingly deserted her husband and died for it. I was really hoping that these two books would do something different, originally I was going to review them separately but decided that it actually made more sense to talk about it in one review rather than rehash a lot of the same points two times. So there will be some spoilers but not anymore than you'd get if you looked at the summary for the second book before you read the first!

Nobody's Princess & Nobody's Prize by Esther Friesner

Manga Review: Olympos

So, on Wednesday I had my wisdom teeth out and, since this is a surgery that results in having four less bones in your body and several other bones quite sore as a result, they gave me some pretty strong painkillers to take for it. Painkillers don't last forever however and when you wake up in the middle of the night when said painkillers stop working you're not always at your most attentive. Which is my round-about way of saying that I accidentally took the wrong drugs on Friday (codeine is nasty stuff y'all) and spent the entire day out of it and even twelve hours after I took the damn thing I was barely lucid enough to get on twitter for half an hour and writing this review was way out of my range of capabilities. Funny enough I had considered writing a few reviews in advance just in case, I'd read this book already, heck when Yen Press announced it I looked it up online to see if it would interest me and read more of it than I meant to, so sorry folks, turns out that getting your wisdom teeth out is a bigger deal than a lot of people make it out to be.


Olympos by Aki

Summary: In the myths they say that the Trojan prince Ganymede was stolen by Zeus to become a cup-bearer for the gods but in these stories he was instead stolen by Apollo to ease his own boredom, something all the gods seem to have in excess. 

The Good: This might sound a little odd but I don't mind how much the gods have been changed up from their original incarnations and here's why; the Greek gods were first and foremost very human in their actions, hence why they were so petty, and getting bored is a very human thing. So, when you take immortal beings, which are still rather human like, and give them nothing to do of course boredom will result, it's an interesting take and I rather like it. 

The Bad: I remember when I first read some of this I really liked it but this time around, between which I had looked at a couple of other people's views and saw they were mostly lukewarm, I was just really bored. The story seemed dull, none of the characters really did anything, nothing essitentally changed by the end, it felt much more like a young creator trying to tell what would be a really hard story for an experienced writer to pull off well, it's just hard to write an interesting story that spends basically half of it's time naval gazing. So unless you happen to like stories like that, and I don't mind naval gazing a lot of the time, you should avoid this one.

The Art: The cover gives you a pretty good idea of what kind of art to expect, graceful pretty boys with little resemblance to either greek physique/clothing in general or the gods they're supposed to be (but the story does provide a reason for that which I'm okay with). The backgrounds are also basic however, it's clear where Aki's artistic talents lie, and it would have been nice to have had some more detailed ones, although given this is a story that's more about characters interacting than the setting, really it could have been set anywhere, it's not a deal killer. I did like however that Yen included the colored pages at the beginning of each volume, I do like how Aki works with color.


So, giving this just a 2.5 out of 5 stars and not really a recommendation given how dull it turned out to be. This is hardly the first time my opinion on something has really changed between when I first started consuming it and when I finished but, as always, I'm a bit confused how I had such conflicting opinions.