Children’s Literature

 This is how this amazing book begins:

“In the high and far-off days when men were heroes and walked with the gods, Peleus, king of the Myrmidons, took for his wife a sea nymph called Thetis”.  

It is a children’s version of the Iliad, written by Rosemary Sutcliff, and in the large-format hardcover, beautifully illustrated by Alan Lee. 

Children’s book? In what alternate universe? But yes, it was written in 1993, then republished this year. I would have loved it as a child. I love it now.  

I saw it reviewed by Meghan Cox Gurdon who reviews children’s books for the Weekend Journal at the Wall Street Journal.  She often makes me wish I had children, because her reviews introduce me to so many wonderful-sounding books. This was irresistible.  

By the way, one thing she does not mention is that much of it is written in iambic pentameter, adding to the enthralling quality.  

Here is her review:

‘In the high and far-off days when men were heroes and walked with the gods, Peleus, king of the Myrmidons, took for his wife a sea nymph called Thetis.” So begins “Black Ships Before Troy” ( Frances Lincoln, 125 pages, $19.99), Rosemary Sutcliff’s superb retelling of the “Iliad.” The book won the Kate Greenaway Medal (the British equivalent of our Caldecott Award), when it first came out in 1993, for Alan Lee’s dramatic, half-dreamlike illustrations. Now reissued, it captures the romance, pathos and savagery of Homer’s Bronze Age epic.

The story, of course, recounts the 10 years of the Trojan War, when massed Greek armies besieged the walled city of Troy and the gods of Olympus took sides. We see Paris, prince of Troy, luring “Helen of the Fair Cheeks” away from her husband, the Greek king Menelaus, in the fateful act that will bring fire and destruction on Troy and its people.

Ms. Sutcliff’s narrative is notable for including painful scenes that do not always make it into abridged versions of the “Iliad” for young readers. Children 9 and older will read, for instance, of the Amazon warrior women and their young queen, Penthesilea, who come to Troy’s defense only to die with horrible swiftness under the blades of Ajax and Achilles, who laugh as they kill. Ms. Sutcliff traces the building of the great hollow horse and the trickery that impels the Trojans to drag the thing inside their walls but also the sack of the city and the killing of King Priam, who is murdered by a young soldier “drunk with fire and killing” even as the king prays at an altar, “so that his life-blood fouled the sanctuary.” It is brutal, memorable stuff, recounted with gripping prose and pale, solemn watercolor pictures.

*sb