It was a strange time. Over us, every second, hung the terror of Achilles' destiny, while the murmurs of war among the gods grew louder. But even I could not fill each minute with fear. I have heard that men who live by a waterfall cease to hear it. In such a way did I learn to live beside the rushing torrent of his doom. The days passed, and he lived. The months passed, and I could go a whole day without looking over the precipice of his death. The miracle of a year, then two.

This is some of the most aloof and distant prose I've read in a while, I don't know how else to describe it. I felt like I was getting the story second- or third-hand, which is kind of impressive in its own way considering it's told entirely in first person narration. Just very detached descriptions of the passage of time and entire chapters where there were maybe one or two lines of dialogue. And truthfully, I struggled through the first two thirds of this book because of a lack of interest, but I'm glad I powered through because the ending was satisfying enough that I don't regret giving this book my time.

I picked this one up as a genre palate cleanser to take a break from horror and because it has near-universal praise from my mutuals on here, although I'm left here scratching my head and thinking, "I mean, it was okay." This is definitely more of a retelling of an existing story than an all-out romance, and I don't begrudge the author for not wanting to stray too far from the source material; it'd be stranger if she did. I just did not connect with any of these characters and I didn't even get the sense they connected with each other until very late in the book.

I have a passing interest in Greek mythology so I knew the main story beats to expect going into it. The concept on focusing on a minor character in the Illiad rather than Achilles was interesting in concept, but I felt like Patroclus wasn't given enough agency here to be interesting. It's difficult me to get behind such a passive protagonist, and I'm also not a fan of themes of destiny and fate and honor and glory; there were so many massive egos to navigate around in this book that it was hard to root for anyone. Again, not ragging on the author because that's what Homer told us was happening on those plains in front of Troy, but maybe I'm just too used to modern fiction to get much enjoyment out of this kind of story.

Glad I finally got around to seeing what all the fuss was about, but this would not be a book that would immediately spring to mind if I were asked for historical gay fiction recommendations.