Requiem for Athens

I signed up on Goodreads for a giveaway copy of Requiem for Athens (#297) which I did not win, but the author, David Alkek, approached me and asked me to read it and give an honest review of his historical fiction novel.  I have posted those reviews on Goodreads and Amazon if you are interested.

This novel is about an Athens whose glory is fading as she is rent by internecine warfare, political bickering and moral decay.  When I was a kid growing up, I loved reading the myths and legends of ancient Greece and stories about her heroes.  I haunted the library's children's section devouring books like A Day in the Life of Ancient Greece.  The problem with Requiem for Athens is that I felt that I had stumbled across a young reader's text book on Greek life as I read the opening section of this novel.  The author has done his research on this book and it shows.  The meticulous maps and lists of historical characters are appreciated.  However, it is not necessary nor desirable to include every fact gleaned from that research in the novel itself. 

There wasn't a whole lot of convincing fictional narrative in this book, and the protagonist, Phidias, was almost a no-show in his own book, he took so little part in the actual action, nor was he placed as a recorder or observer of events as they unfolded.  It was almost as if he was included as an after thought.  You couldn't really work up enough energy about Phidias to either love him or loathe him, or even just like him.  It's a shame, really, because the part that featured Alexander conquering Greece, Egypt, Persia and India, was the best part of this book.  If the whole novel had been written with that same conviction, this would be an exceptional book.  As it is, I can't really recommend it except for people who read absolutely everything ever written about ancient Greece.

On a positive note, though, you know that cover art is my personal hobby horse, and I would like to give kudos to whomever designed the cover for Requiem for Athens.  It really made me want to dive right into this book, so it did its job admirably.