The Praise Singer
by:
Mary Renault (author)
ISBN:
9780140113006 (0140113002)
Edition language: English
Revisited over the holiday period. Last read when I was a teenager, many moons ago. I loved this book even more this time, and found much truth in its pages. It is a skillful blend of careful and detailed research into the period (6th century BC), fictional invention and brilliant writing. There is ...
My introduction to Mary Renault was The King Must Die, the first of two novels about Theseus--it was actually assigned reading in high school. What impressed me so much there was how she took a figure out of myth and grounded him historically. After that I quickly gobbled up all of Renault's works o...
Mary Renault's series of Greek novels are an amazing rendition of the Greek world, and of them all I think The Praise Singer is possibly the best. Simple and direct, with vivid detail, it tells the life story of the poet Simonides. Simonides lived at a time of great upheaval: the period when the g...
3.5 – 4 starsMary Renault’s _The Praise Singer_ is another highly enjoyable visit to the world of ancient Greece. This time we have left the heroic age of her consummate Theseus series (The King Must Die and The Bull from the Sea) and entered the early classical period of Athens during the reigns of...
Rating: 4* of fiveThis book was a re-read, I feel sure, since I was hooked on her stuff in the Seventies...yet I felt curiously unfamiliar with the book. I recalled some scenes, such as Simonides returning from home to rejoin his master Kleobis in their Samian exile; I found a lot of the book to be ...
16 years ago
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