4.5 Conquered StarsI drew close and whispered, "I love you, Alexander," and kissed him. Never mind, I thought, from whom his heart accepts it. Let it be according to his wish. My hair had fallen on his breast. His eyes opened; his hand moved, and touched a strand, and ran it between his fingers.H...
I cannot remember how I discovered Mary Renault’s novels, but most likely at my local library which I haunted. Although I read them all as a teenager, many years ago, their beauty and humanity are still a strong influence. While The King Must Die and the Alexandrian books may have had a stronger ...
The past, they say, is a foreign country. One might even go so far as to say that it is another world full of strange wonders and people who both fascinate and repel. I imagine that is why history so intrigues me and I definitely approach the subject with a heaping portion of romance as I in no w...
Rating: 4* of fiveThe Publisher Says: In the story of the great lyric poet Simonides, Mary Renault brings alive a time in Greece when tyrants kept an unsteady rule and poetry, music, and royal patronage combined to produce a flowering of the arts. Born into a stern farming family on the island of...
Alexander has always been a mystery to me. To be honest, I've always been a bit frustrated with his legacy. We tend to picture Alex as the beautiful, idealized conquering hero in a way that we never would with someone like Attila the Hun. For most of my life my theory on why this is has been rela...
4.5 starsMary Renault’s _The Bull from the Sea_ takes up where The King Must Die left off and continues the legendary story of Theseus and his kingship of Attica. There are some differences between this volume and its predecessor, most notably in the fact that the scope of this tale is much broad...
I was severely disappointed in this novel, by an author whose classically-themed books I enjoyed. I actually read the Virago 2005 reprint, which contains the Afterword by the author herself, but no other commentary.The story concerns the timid, repressed Elsie Lane's great adventure in running aw...
Don't read the Author's Note at the end. Spoiler Alerts had not been invented yetAs someone with only a passing knowledge of the life and times of Alexander the Great, he lived in Greece a few hundred years before Christ and conquered lands from Egypt to Afghanistan, I was happy to discover this ...
This was my first Mary Renault novel and I loved it a lot. I read everyone's praises of her extraordinary ability to describe places from thousands of years ago like she had been there, and I agree wholeheartedly. The 400 B.C. Greece comes to life on the pages of this novel. It is so seamless, so...