Black Ships

I received an advance copy of Black Ships by Jo Graham (March 2008) via the always wonderful LibraryThing Early Reviewers program. The way the Early Reviewers group works is, you request books you would be interested in reading from a list of available titles, then the magic of LibraryThing analyzes your current library, runs a few crazy algorithms, and matches you up with one of the titles. If you are lucky. Since I like to read pretty much anything, I tend to request all the fiction and a good chunk of the available non-fiction titles too. So, when this copy of Black Ships showed up, I initially thought I had made a poor selection. I mean, just check out the description:

The world is ending. One by one the mighty cities are falling, to earthquakes, to flood, to raiders on both land and sea. In a time of war and doubt, Gull is an oracle. Daughter of a slave taken from fallen Troy, chosen at the age of seven to be the voice of the Lady of the Dead, it is her destiny to counsel kings. When nine black ships appear, captained by an exiled Trojan prince, Gull must decide between the life she has been destined for and the most perilous adventure — to join the remnant of her mother's people in their desperate flight. From the doomed bastions of the City of Pirates to the temples of Byblos, from the intrigues of the Egyptian court to the haunted caves beneath Mount Vesuvius, only Gull can guide Prince Aeneas on his quest, and only she can dare the gates of the Underworld itself to lead him to his destiny. In the last shadowed days of the Age of Bronze, one woman dreams of the world beginning anew. This is her story.

An oracle named Gull? Pirates? Princes? I thought maybe I had fallen down into the slippery slope of fantasy writing. Would there be dragons in this thing? Who knows?

Luckily I am ultimately an open-minded reader and I gave Black Ships a shot. And you know what? It was really a very compelling and fun to read book. And much smarter than I initially thought it would be.

Graham based her debut novel on Virgil's Aeneid -- the struggle of the Trojans who fled their dying city (after the whole Trojan horse thing), went off in ships and had a bunch of adventures, and ended up founding Rome. Our narrator, Gull, has the unique position of being a woman who all the men will listen to (since she is a priestess). And since priestesses are allowed to have lovers and bear children (just not get married) she also gets herself into a tidy little love triangle with a ship's captain and Prince Aeneas himself. Nice. Combine all that with some interesting history (and Graham really did her research), a trip to Egypt, a smattering of Greek mythology, and a whole lot of ship-sailing and battle fighting, and you end up with a pretty nice little novel.

Black Ships won me over completely. Early Reviewers, I will never doubt the power of your algorithms again!