The Song of Achilles
Cut along the dashed lines and pass the cards around the table.
Read aloud the opening paragraph. What does Miller's first sentence promise about voice, register, and emotional stakes?
Which single image or sentence did you underline, photograph, or return to? What about the cadence or diction made it stay with you?
Miller filters the entire epic through Patroclus's first-person perspective. How does that POV reshape scenes we expect to feel heroic, and what is gained or sacrificed compared to Homer's omniscient grandeur?
Consider Miller's use of present-tense lyric description against past-tense narration. How does her sentence rhythm change in scenes of intimacy versus scenes of war?
The novel inherits a 3,000-year tradition (Homer, the Greek tragedians, Ovid, later poets). Where does Miller seem to be in conversation with her sources, and where does she quietly diverge?
How does Miller handle prophecy and foreknowledge as a structural device? What craft problems does writing toward a known mythic outcome create, and how does she solve them?
Miller spent roughly a decade writing this novel and later returned to the same world in Circe. What preoccupations (voice, marginal figures, the texture of divinity) seem to define her body of work as it stands?
Critics have placed the book within a recent wave of feminist and queer classical retellings (Atwood, Barker, Haynes). What does Miller's prose style contribute to that tradition that the others do not, and where do you think the novel will sit in twenty years?