Another example: in Homer’s Iliad, a soldier left on an island to die of a lethal serpent bite is found alive ten years later. What?! How’d she get that chance? Why didn’t the witch simply turn her into chicken powder? Unless, of course, the witch was an accomplice in her own demise (see my novel The Magic Circle). For example, Gretel burns up the witch in the oven.
What draws me in is a narrative black hole - one I not only can’t escape but plunge into with abandon if the light won’t come to me, I go to it. They challenge me: how do I interest readers in a story they already know? Their plots grip me so hard I can barely breathe. They have stood the test of time, and I want to harness that power. (Oct.I often write novels based on fairy tales, folktales, myths, and religious stories. There are better romantic YA novels built on Greek myth (e.g., Doris Orgel's The Princess and the God) for mermaid lore see Mary Pope Osborne's Mermaid Stories from Around the World. The atmosphere is surprisingly arid, and the language slides dangerously between the stuff of high drama and pulp romance. Napoli (Song of the Magdalene) is at her best when she compares Philoctetes's and Sirena's points of view about subjects like honor, but the bulky apparatus she constructs overwhelms the writing. She becomes immortal, a gift that she does not want in light of her lover's inability to share it, and then she must yield him up when fate calls upon him to reenter the Trojan War. True to the legend, this Philoctetes has been abandoned by his crew mates because of a snake bite-but instead of spending the next 10 years letting his wounds fester, per the Sophoclean model, this hero falls in love with an equally adoring Sirena. There she meets the Greek warrior Philoctetes (the subject of a famous play by Sophocles). Sirena, however, exiles herself from this grim mating game and winds up on the island of Lemnos. Offered immortality if they can win a man's love, Sirena's mermaid sisters use their silvery voices to lure sailors to them even though it will cause the sailors certain death. A lengthy, even laborious set-up invents a genealogy for mermaids within Greek mythology (at least, this appears invented there are no source notes). Like its mermaid heroine, this uneven novel is something of a hybrid: a romantic fantasy imposed atop a classical legend.
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