Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Crunch time

I knew it would happen. I knew it from the moment I started. Odyssey of a Slave is a trilogy that re-tells the story of Homer's epic, The Odyssey. Problem: Officially, it spans ten years, seven of which are spent on the island of Calypso the nymph, during which nothing happens. Or rather, during which he spends his days pining for his wife Penelope back on Ithaca, and his nights doing his best to forget her with the help of Calypso. (The nymph, not the music. Presumably.)

My story, though, is about Alexi, Odysseus's slave. I'm pretty sure Homer would have mentioned if there had been a slave hanging around on Calypso's island. Besides, it'd be boring. And three's a crowd anyway. So Alexi has to spend some time doing something else. What else? Well, he's felt guilty about his sister, who saved him from the Greeks, ever since she was captured in Troy, and although he's discovered a few things about her (no, I won't say what, in case you haven't read the second book yet), so in the third book, he will spend a lot of his time looking for her, and having some pretty amazing adventures as he does so.

What sort of adventures? Well, I'll say only that he encounters some of the other characters from the Trojan war, or their sons, and has some really butt-kicking adventures. In the process, he learns an important truth about the Trojan War (or the Greek War, as the Trojans called it) that we would be smart to understand today.