I don’t know what I had expected it to be, but Goddess of Yesterday, by Caroline B. Cooney, turns out to be a sort of Mary Renault that never was. It’s the story of a girl caught up in the Trojan War, although I didn’t really expect her to actually wind up in Troy at the start of the war, hobnobbing with Hector and Paris and Priam and so on.
I wound up balancing my enjoyment of the book (which I enjoyed, by the way) with my suspicion that the ending would absolutely stink. After all, once you get a fourteen-year-old girl to Troy at the beginning of the war, you are going do have to deal with the fact that she’s twenty-eight or so when the Greeks build an enormous wooden badger and leave it at the gate. Ms. Cooney did not, after all, ruin the ending, so all that suspicion went to waste.
I should mention, since I’m talking about the Trojan War and all, that when we were telling our Perfect Non-Reader the story of the Trojan War, she followed the whole thing perfectly happily through the Apple of Discord, the abduction of Helen, the fourteen-year siege, Achilles sulking in his tent, Priam ransoming the body of Hector, the building of the Horse, all of that. But Laocoon being eaten by a sea monster, no, that wasn’t at all plausible, we must have been making that up.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.