Showing 1-3 out of 3 reviews.

• Rudyard Kipling was the first novelist who ever made me cry. George MacDonald Fraser was the second. Mary Renault was the third. She did it with "Funeral Games," which is about the murderous brawl fought between the heirs of Alexander the Great after the death of Alexander.For what it's worth, I'm an off-duty Marine and there aren't many things that can make me cry because I typically don't feel sorry for anyone. I read all of Mary Renault away back in the middle 1980s and found all of her works about equally good. Speaking of style: if Sophocles had married Sappho, the two of them together might have come up with something as good as the stuff Renault wrote during the last 30 years of her life. Speaking of structure: if instead of novels Renault had built watches, the people who then worked for Rolex would have gone begging.Solomon sez: You ought to try one of Renault's books if you like vividly imagined, hauntingly beautiful, fast moving stories that are accurate in detail; they also feature heroic characters, timeless themes and tragic endings. If you don't care for that sort of stuff, read something else.

  5.00 out of 5

  dekesolomon

• My favorite book of the trilogy. This was the one that felt the most historical and the least fictional. What a time to live through.... or to try to live through.

  4.00 out of 5

  michellegarrette

• Somewhat dissappointing. Renault uses multiple third person narrators instead of the single first person narrator used in <i>The King Must Die</i> and <i>The Persian Boy</i>. The novel fails to create the emotional resonance of the other two -- partly because of the change in narration and partly because so few of the characters are truly sympathetic.

  2.50 out of 5

  krasiviye.slova

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