RaveThe Washington Post\"Frazier’s historical research generally sits lightly on the story, almost always embedded gracefully in dialogue, a small telling incident or a sharp memory of kindness or brutality. His prose is both of the characters’ time and perfectly evocative ... This novel has much to offer those of us who are living through what Carl Bernstein has taken to calling a \'cold civil war,\' but in the end it is a finely wrought novel that will reward rereading. Elegiac without being exculpatory, it is an indictment of complicity without ignoring the historic complexity of the great evil at the core of American history.\
Madeline Miller
RaveThe Washington PostHomer tells us what happened but not why. Miller’s Song of Achilles provides that back story, an exegesis that draws the personal and the intimate out of Homer’s virile action adventure...Gradually, The Song of Achilles becomes a quiet love story, one so moving that I was reluctant to move on to the war and Homer’s tale of perverted honor and stubborn pride. But Miller segues into that more public story with grace … In prose as clean and spare as the driving poetry of Homer, Miller captures the intensity and devotion of adolescent friendship and lets us believe in these long-dead boys for whom sea nymphs and centaurs are not legend but lived reality.
Ron Hansen
MixedThe Washington PostThe Kid is narrated with a wry voice capable of turning a nice phrase ... Hansen’s research is admirably thorough. His narrator, however, rarely allows Billy or anyone else to be revealed through thought, emotion, words or action...Soon, the novel becomes akin to reading a census ... And that is this novel’s central problem: These named persons cannot properly be considered characters. Some are initially given a short biography and physical description, but none is fully realized. The narrator just won’t get out of their way.
