Last Of The Amazons

The myth of the formidable female warrior race is given credible and exciting life in this literary blood-and-thunder novel set in the time of ancient Greece. The Amazons despise the Greeks and were outraged when their queen Antiope fell in love with Theseus, the King of Athens, abandoning her tribe to be Theseus's wife. This terrible treachery had to be avenged and the women gathered together in a mighty female army led by Eleuthera, Antiope's lover and successor, to extract revenge. The book is full of battle: scenes of close combat, decapitations, the merciless killing of infants and women and, of course, complete contempt for male soldiers - so much so that it seems the culture of the Amazons is saturated in blood. But despite the gore, the novel is a compelling read. It has a loose structure, written from the viewpoints of the various characters and held together by the main narrator, Bones. Bones and her sister Europa, both from a noble Greek family, had a captured Amazonian governess, Selene. She fills them with enthusiasm for the Amazon way of life, and when Selene leaves Europa sneaks away in the night to follow her. Pressfield creates a believable world of viragos and the society they come from; how they take lovers in threes, how the children are reared, their attitude to love and death and their love for their horses. Their collective life is more important than the life of the individual - an Amazon always speak of herself as 'she', never 'I'. The book is busy with action and the savagery of hand-to-hand combat, but although some of it makes for gruesome reading, the narrative urges the reader on. Written with passion and great imagination, the novel roars away like a charging, yelling army into battle and sweeps the reader into the spirited world of a myth given new life. (Kirkus UK)