I wanted so much to give this book five stars. I love the Iliad, and I devour new translations. I've encountered this author's blog posts and he has a remarkably clear style that I really enjoy. And for the most part, he brings that clarity to his take on this ancient tale. But there are a few too many careless liberties taken with the myth for my taste. While I can understand changing accepted 'facts' (inasmuch as anything in myth can be accounted a fact), an author will normally have a reason for doing so, which is explained in the text. Dolan makes changes seemingly out of careless recollection.

How do you stuff up the Olympian family tree that badly? Athene is not Hera’s daughter, for one thing, nor is Hypnos her brother, and conflating Demeter and Persephone is lazy. He has Hera asking Zeus for ‘permission to see her parents, who are fighting again’ (her parents being Cronus and Rhea, only one of whom is imprisoned in Tartarus). I have to wonder what version of the Oresteia he read where Orestes kills Agamemnon, because I’m pretty sure the whole point of the cycle goes out the window if you do that. It's as though the author wrote his Iliad based on an imperfect memory of something he read in high school.

In short, read this, because it’s very good. But if you have any background in classics, it’s going to annoy you. ( )