I’m starting this a day early because I don’t want to add to the thread, only to have it ignored in a day.
Double or Nothing by Kim Sherwood – the latest authorized Bond novel actually has very little James Bond in it. He only shows up, sparingly, in flashbacks, and there’s a strong suggestion that he’s dead. The folks who own the Bond franchise say that they’re branching out, exploring the “double O universe”, which I think means that they want to freshen the franchise. Sherwood’s writing is excellent, suggesting rather than overtly stating, and often relying on the reader to either have obscure knowledge of things, or be able to dope it out. I was thinking that Sherwood – so far the only female author of Bond novels (if you discount Samantha Weinberg’s Miss Moneypenny books), the astonishingly young Ms. Sherwood nevertheless has either a fantastic imagination or deep research skills – or so I thought until I read the list of acknowledgments in the back. Lots of expertise went into this book. I recommend it, but be aware that you’re getting precious little James Bond.
The Shadow of Perseus by Claire Heywood. Several people recommended this book to me, undoubtedly because of my book Medusa: Solving the Mystery of the Gorgon (which is almost a quarter of a century old! Damn!). It’s her follow-up to her debut novel Daughters of Sparta, and is another novel-based -on-myth by a classical scholar. In this one Heywood eliminates anything fantastic. There are no gods or monsters. The story is told from the points of view of the three women associated with the myth – Danae, Medusa, and Andromeda. She gives each a distinctly different voice and culture. Danae is a Greek princess who is impregnated nit by Zeus in the form of a shower of gold (after her imprisonment by her father to prevent such a pregnancy), but by the baker’s son Myron, who knows how to break into her cell. Medusa is part of a tribe of independent women who live apart, having suffered abuses from men. And Andromeda is not princess, but the tattooed daughter of a North African oasis-dweller who voluntarily submitted to an ordeal to save her people. Literally self-sacrificing.
And Perseus? He’s the Hero as Homicidal Maniac. Like John Cleese as Lancelot besieging Swamp Castle in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but without the humor. He’d rather stab first and ask questions later, and he dispatches at least four major characters. He’s not at all sympathetic or likable, coming across more like a religious fanatic than hero. Heywood tries to give psychological reasons for this, but they don’t, to my mind, explain how he became so extreme. She’s at her best exploring the inner lives of her female characters. Danae gets two big sections, coming back at the end to wrap it all up.