Amazing book. This book is so well written that it both explains my complaints about The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane and crushes the other book with its superior quality as a book. Annabel Lyon writes in first person as Aristotle, so you get to hear his thoughts and you get to feel his impressions for people - you are never told that he is a manic depressive little man with a great mind, you see it and you feel it instead.
The story revolves around Aristotle's life as he begins teaching Alexander the Great as a child. You get a good sense of what life could be like in ancient Macedonia, and you get a distinct impression of Alexander and Aristotle's personalities. Both become great men in the eyes of history, but both were seen as wild and crazy and unusual in their time.
My one complaint is the amount of swearing included in the book. It's a little jarring when you read it for the first time, because you don't expect to see it in a historical novel. However, when you think about it, that is the language they would have used in a warrior society - not everybody spoke as eloquently as Shakespeare would have us believe.
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