The Lost Books of the Odyssey by Zachary Mason

Grade: D

About the author: This is Zachary Mason’s first novel.

This novel is a collection of alternate versions of the stories of Odysseus. He imagines new scenarios for Odysseus’s home coming, and in one story makes the claim that Penelope, Odysseus’s wife, is actually Helen of Troy. In another, Odysseus was actually a coward who escaped from the Trojan War to become a bard (Homer) and created his own heroic accomplishments from his imagination.

It reads as a collection of short stories which aren’t put in any real order. They don’t follow the timeline the original Odyssey does, and isn’t grouped by plot. Alternate versions of The Trojan War are intermixed with Odysseus’s journey to Hell and Cassandra’s tale.

I would recommend this book only to Greek mythology gurus, especially those obsessed with The Odyssey. I would not recommend the book to anyone else. I enjoyed The Odyssey when I read it in high school and was something of a Greek mythology nut myself back in the day, and I was still terribly bored for the majority of the book. Some of the stories are so vague it’s difficult to tell who the tale is about and what is going on.

Mason does mirror the style of writing in The Odyssey pretty well, with some modernization to make it more easily readable. It seems well researched (he tells stories of the major players in mythology, but also drops in some lesser known) but I wasn’t going to bother to check his facts. He adds some footnotes to help the reader along, but they are not stories within themselves or amusing, as other reviews have stated. They are simply helpful.

Some of the stories are interesting “what if” scenarios, but for the most part just doesn’t hold my interest. I give it a D for not holding my interest and for failing to be “amusing” as it was so often described.

Here is a more in-depth review, if interested: NY Times Review