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Summary: this book was VERY hard to follow!
Review: this book was very confusing for me,i had to do a report on it and i was so lost. ....thanx!
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Summary: The King Must Die by Mary Renault
Review: This book, captures a period of time that little is known about. It brings ancient Greece, and acncient civilization to life. But besides the historical aspect, you see the core of man. Theseus, is proud and it is his pride that drives him through everything, it keeps him going. Things along the way help him, leadership, talent but throughout his long journey it is his pride that is his endless supply of fuel.
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Summary: Fantastic book
Review: This is a book I just reread for the zillionth time. I just love it. It's a first person retelling of the Legend of Theseus. The author takes a lot of liberty in telling the story, but through that makes it believable and very immediate. We follow him through his early childhood, his famous travels through the Isthmus Road, meeting his father in Athens, being chosen/taken to be a bull-dancer in Crete, and fighting the Minotaur. While he clearly believes that he receives signs from the gods, the reader is free to believe that or to take a more practical viewpoint (i.e. the waves suddenly crashed over his head not because he had just asked Poseidon for a sign, but because he's in the ocean and those things happen). It's a fascinating story and I highly recommend it. There are some mentions of s3x and nud!ty but nothing particularly graphic. I would probably say that pre-teens are parent's choice, but older than that should have no concerns.
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Summary: A completely absorbing adventure into the heroic soul.
Review: This is the first Mary Renault novel I've read, but if all of them are this good, I've got many days of great reading to anticipate. From the first page I was hooked into this riveting story, in which the combination of youthful pride and spiritual responsibility lift the boy Theseus into the role of king and culture hero. One of this books greatest pleasures is watching the way his restless curiosity turns the institutions which seek to victimize him upside down. Theseus can't seem to help landing on his feet, but the circumstances drawn around his victories are consistantly plausable, so much so that I was carried through this book on a wave of amazed admiration at the resiliancy of his character. The characters surrounding him were also excellently drawn. It's been a long time since I've read a book in which I cared so viscerally whether the characters lived or died. At each crisis of the story I was propelled on with a sense of anxious dread, fearing someone would come to harm, but unable to stop reading because I just had to know. I finished this book with all my expectations of it exceeded. I can't reccommend it highly enough. Five stars are too few.
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Summary: A wonderful adaptation
Review: This is the retelling of the legends of Theseus from the obvious point of view. Mary Renault spins a tale of avarice, love, and hubris, the chief ingredients to any epic story featuring a Greek hero. Theseus starts off as a very likable toddler who fancies himself the brother of a sacred bull and the child of Poseidon. He remains likable throughout his young years, developing an astounding modicum of leadership, genius, and tact. He also becomes a chauvinistic womanizer, but somehow, we like him, all the same. Theseus' grasp on feminism is tenuous. In fact, he almost actively fights against it, being a harbinger of the end of mother worship and matriarchy in the area. Renault does a wonderful job portraying Theseus' vacillation between equality and misogyny. It is with utmost determination that Theseus learns to count on female warriors/athletes as equals in stamina and intelligence. Regardless, he follows tradition in claiming attractive women as war booty. Theseus does not remain likable throughout the story. He becomes irascible and quick to judge later on in the story, faults which come back to haunt him in his elder years. Although the pacing occasionally plods, this is an excellent book. The first half is the more action-packed and exciting of the two, but the doomed fate foreshadowing reaches its denouement in the much darker second half. After all, we already know the king must die.
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Summary: Renault retells classical mythology better than anyone!
Review: This tale of Theseus and ancient Crete has been one of my favorite books since I first read it at age ten (I'm now 30). Clearly, those who have given this novel a negative review are uninformed "readers" with no background in classical mythology or history. They remind me of the person who asked me for Homer's last name when I was trying to locate Lattimore's translation of the Illiad. Renault writes with a real storyteller's skill, something all too rare today, and brings the story of Theseus's conquest of Crete to life. A truly wonderful book!
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Summary: a HORRID book if i do say so
Review: This was a great Classical Greek Hero story (thats what my teacher said). I started at a new school and had to catch up on this book in two weeks because i wasnt there for summer reading. I have read a whole series of books (such as The Left Behind Series) in only 2 weeks, but this novel was confusing, and oddly written and i couldnt seem to pick it up where i usually cant put a book down. I took my all to actually finish the book in that time. it was just another horrible greek story that they shove down your throat in english class.
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Summary: The Theseus legend brought to life
Review: Those readers who were upset at Mary Renault "tampering" with the accepted myth of Theseus should realize that her interest is not mythology but history. As a historical novelist, Renault has no peer. She researched her subjects thoroughly and evoked the time and place so accurately that her books seem to spring into life. She was less interested in Theseus as a mythological figure than as a historical figure, and her rendering of Theseus as a lightweight, fast on his feet, quick and active, seems absolutely correct. Renault is probably correct in believing that the myth of the minotaur in the labyrinth derived from the actual bull dancers of ancient Crete, who were for the most part captive slaves from the subject territories ruled by Crete three thousand years ago, and her depiction of the bull court, and the team Theseus trained to dance with the bulls, realizing that they would either all survive together or they would all die together, is more compelling than any labyrinth story we are already familiar with. In "The King Must Die", Theseus becomes a very human figure we can relate to and empathize with, rather than a stiff mythological figure more god than man. This is Renault's genius -- she brings ancient civilizations so vividly to life that we feel we are right there in the middle of the action. "The King Must Die" is one of her best.
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Summary: The Theseus legend brought to life
Review: Those readers who were upset at Mary Renault "tampering" with the accepted myth of Theseus should realize that her interest is not mythology but history. As a historical novelist, Renault has no peer. She researched her subjects thoroughly and evoked the time and place so accurately that her books seem to spring into life. She was less interested in Theseus as a mythological figure than as a historical figure, and her rendering of Theseus as a lightweight, fast on his feet, quick and active, seems absolutely correct. Renault is probably correct in believing that the myth of the minotaur in the labyrinth derived from the actual bull dancers of ancient Crete, who were for the most part captive slaves from the subject territories ruled by Crete three thousand years ago, and her depiction of the bull court, and the team Theseus trained to dance with the bulls, realizing that they would either all survive together or they would all die together, is more compelling than any labyrinth story we are already familiar with. In "The King Must Die", Theseus becomes a very human figure we can relate to and empathize with, rather than a stiff mythological figure more god than man. This is Renault's genius -- she brings ancient civilizations so vividly to life that we feel we are right there in the middle of the action. "The King Must Die" is one of her best.
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Summary: Critically acclaimed when it appeared, but doesn't hold up.
Review: When I went back to re-read this book after several years, so I could do this review, I couldn't understand why I didn't remember much about it. After finishing it for the second time, I now see why: despite a skillful command of the language and her material, Mary Renault's efforts here fall well short of the positive critical reception with which this book was received when it was initially published. Working with recently developed theories, based on modern archaelogical discoveries which reveal a labrynthine palatial structure in ancient Crete, along with a tradition of sacred "bull dancing" (which may be the historical precursor of the Spanish tradition of bull fighting and of bull running in Pamplona), Renault here crafts a modern re-telling of the Theseus legend -- the boy hero of Athens condemned as a sacrifice to the Cretan minotaur in Cnossos, who dwelt within a mysterious labarynth from which no one who entered could ever find his or her way out again. In the legendary tale, Theseus wins the love of Ariadne, the princess of Crete, and she tells him how to find his way through to the monster and safely out again (using a string to trace his way through the maze). In the end the hero kills the monster and steals away with the princess, though he subsequently abandons her on one of the islands south of the Greek mainland. Modern archaelogy certainly appears to confirm the existence of many of the elements found in the legend and Renault wove these together into her narrative to make a quick-reading, modern tale (which is still true to its legendary antecedents). But, despite the author's obvious erudition, the tale never leaps to life and the reconstruction of the ancient Minyan, Achaian and Cretan cultures, while intelligently done, never fulfills its promise. It's hard to care very much about these people and you never quite feel the reality of the cultures in which the tale is told. The love scenes are "tastefully" cryptic, in keeping with the mores of the time and milieu in which the book was presented, but there is an overly intellectual quality here, a distance and abstract coolness which never quite seizes the reader to make the book live. So, while the book reads well, for the most part, and is professionally executed, it doesn't achieve the highest levels of literary accomplishment to which a good novel (historical or otherwise) should aspire. Robert Graves did the Greek thing much better in his "Hercules, My Shipmate" (though that book is, perhaps, a bit more esoteric and therefore less accessible to the average reader) and Hope Muntz did it best of all, for historical novels in general, with her "The Golden Warrior" about the epic struggle for power and England, between Harold and William, in 1066. Mary Renault, despite the kindness of reviewers at the time, just doesn't approach them with this book. -- Stuart W. Mirsky (swmirsky@usa.net
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