Read Fire from Heaven Alexander the Great series Book 1 edition by Mary Renault Literature Fiction eBooks

Product details File Size 4190 KB Print Length 384 pages Publisher Open Road Media (September 10, 2013) Publication Date September 10, 2013 Sold by  Digital Services LLC Language English ASIN B00DCGJ6Z4

Fire from Heaven Alexander the Great series Book 1 edition by Mary Renault Literature Fiction eBooks Reviews

• Mary Renault writes a great historical novel, with lots of excellent research, but then she brings it to life with memorable, believable characters. After reading about the first years, how the toddler, young Alexander was raised by his half-witch mother, Queen Olympias, and then taken away by his father, King Phillip of Macedon, you feel you understand some about him. Reading about the tutors and young men around Alexander, friends and his eventual lover, Hephaestion, you start to see Alexander become his own person. Unlike other reviewers, I prefer this book to the others of the trilogy... perhaps simply because Alexander has all his life and exciting future before him.
• Mary Renault was an English writer best known for her historical novels set in Ancient Greece. In addition to vivid fictional portrayals of Theseus, Socrates, Plato and Alexander the Great, she wrote a non-fiction biography of Alexander. If you have not yet read her work, do yourself a favor and purchase one of her novels... I particularly recommend either The Persian Boy or The Last of the Wine. This is also quite good. You will feel like you just spend a summer in ancient Greece.
• This would be one of the worst books I've ever read if I'd been able to force myself to finish it.
  
  I bought this because I loved the Persian Boy which was a decent historical novel with good prose, and I was hoping for another good book from the author. This book turned me off of buying anything by her ever again - the Persian Boy must have been a fluke. I've never before or since read anything with such a garbled, unfocused narrative. Alexander is the over-glorified focus of the story - but I cannot tell you who the main character was because every chapter or every few pages the story seemed to completely drop what had come before and start over with a different character and setting like an apparating groundhog day. I'd say most of the stories could have been interesting, but not as they were presented here and only if the author stuck with anything.
• This is the first volume of Mary Renault's trilogy on Alexander the Great, the other two being "The Persian Boy" and "Funeral Games". While they are novels, they are quite reliable in their history. The immediacy of the narrative conveys a better understanding of life in those times than most history books. This volume covers Alexander's childhood to young adulthood, including the dramatic events surrounding his ascension to the throne at age 20 after his father's assassination. Though Renault was not an academic, her research for this trilogy was sufficient to became the basis for two non-fiction books on Alexander.
  
  Renault is a master at making her characters come alive without violating the confines of their known history. She is an excellent writer, and the Alexander trilogy (at least the first two books) and her "The Last of the Wine" are her best writing in my opinion. After I read this book, I read quite a bit of other literature on Alexander, and then later read this book again. I believe that the more a reader knows about Alexander, the more he/she will appreciate this book. The ancient sources on Alexander are seamlessly woven into the developing narrative. In addition, there are fictionalized adolescent relationships that very well prefigure documented central relationships of his later life, including his lifelong friend Hephestion.
  
  Renault clearly likes Alexander, but does not fall victim to the hagiographic style of many Alexander historians before 1950, like Tarn. She is a good counterweight to a modern school of Alexander historians, like Borza, Green, Worthington, etc., who seem intent on deconstructing his greatness and military genius.
  
  The book succeeds as history, but even more importantly for this book, it succeeds as a novel. The characters are authentic and the narrative arc is spellbinding. Renault's writing introduced me to historical fiction years ago, and made me a lifelong fan of it.
• I was captivated from the first few words. Renault's rich and descriptive writing draws you into the world of Ancient Greece and Macedonia, and it is fascinating. I had never been interested in historical fiction before, but this book gave me an appreciation for it. I know that the author is respected as an historian, and I found that the history depicted (e.g. public, recorded events) matched up with the straight history that I had read and was reading concurrently with this book. So I never felt like I was taking in wrong information. It isn't hard to distinguish between historical fact and the filling in of details in this book. The author also includes a section at the end of the book explaining some of her assumptions and choices.
  
  I read this after returning from a trip to Greece, which of course made the landscapes and distances easier to imagine. It was thrilling to read about Alexander and Hephaestion climbing up to Acrocorinth from Corinth after having recently made the same climb!