Hades' Daughter (The Troy Game #1) - Softcover

Douglass, Sara

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0765344424 ISBN 13: 9780765344427

Publisher: Tor Books, 2003

Synopsis

The Troy Game, Book I
Hades' Daughter

Ancient Greece is a place where mortals are the playthings of the gods―but at the core of each mortal city-state is a Labyrinth, where the mortals can shape the heavens to their own design.

When Theseus comes away from the Labyrinth with the prize of freedom and his beloved Ariadne, the Mistress of the Labyrinth, his future seems assured. But she bears him only a daughter―and when he casts her aside for this, the world seems to change. From that day forward, the Labyrinths decay, and power fades from the city-states.

A hundred years pass, Troy falls, the Trojans scatter. Then Brutus, the warrior-king of Troy, receives a vision of distant shores where he can rebuild the ancient kingdom. He will move heaven and earth to reach his destiny. But in the mists is a woman of power, a descendent of Ariadne, who has her own reasons for luring Brutus to this lush land. Her heart is filled with a generations-old hatred, and her vengeance on him will not be thwarted.

If Brutus makes the journey successfully, it will be the next step in the Game of the Labyrinth, and the beginning of a complicated contest of wills that will last for centuries...

About this title

Review

In the ancient world, Crete is not the only land with a Labyrinth at its heart. Labyrinth magic protects Troy and the Greek city-states, as well. Then Theseus steals away Ariadne, Mistress of the Cretan Labyrinth, who for love of him betrayed her own father. But Theseus abandons Ariadne for her sister, and in revenge, Ariadne unweaves the magic of all the world's remaining Labyrinths, unleashing an age of catastrophe. The gods weaken, Atlantis sinks, and Troy falls. Then Brutus, the warrior king of lost Troy, is promised a new Troy and a new Labyrinth if he carries out the destructive will of a mysterious, beautiful figure who appears to him in visions. But is she the goddess Artemis, as she claims, or a vengeful woman who has abandoned both mortality and mercy?

Hades' Daughter is a dark, bloody epic of power, passion, and betrayal. The opening is bumpy--which is no surprise, for the early events range from Theseus's treachery to the fall of Troy and beyond. The prose and pacing become smoother as the saga focuses on Brutus and the princess Cornelia, whose father Brutus killed and whose city he destroyed. Brutus takes Cornelia as his wife with as horrible an act as possible, short of death. Nonetheless, a relationship grows between them. Unfortunately, given their extremely rocky start, it's never clear why Cornelia undergoes a change of heart, but this self-contained first novel of a new trilogy will appeal to some fans of high fantasy, historical fantasy, and those who enjoy Greek and British legends. --Cynthia Ward

About the Author

Sara Douglass was born in Penola, a small farming settlement in the south of Australia, in 1957. She spent her early years chasing (and being chased by) sheep and collecting snakes before her parents transported her to the city of Adelaideand the more genteel surroundings of Methodist Ladies College. Having graduated, Sara then became a nurse on her parents' urging (it was both feminine and genteel) and spent seventeen years planning and then effecting her escape.

That escape came in the form of a Ph.D. in early modern English history. Sara and nursing finally parted company after a lengthy time of bare tolerance, and she took up a position as senior lecturer in medieval European history at the Bendigo campus of the Victorian University of La Trobe. Finding the departmental politics of academic life as intolerable as the emotional rigours of nursing, Sara needed to find another escape.

This took the form of one of Sara's childhood loves - books and writing. Spending some years practising writing novels, HarperCollins Australia picked up one of Sara's novels, BattleAxe (published in North America as The Wayfarer Redemption), the first in the Tencendor series, and chose it as the lead book in their new fantasy line with immediate success. Since 1995 Sara has become Australia's leading fantasy author and one of its top novelists. Her books are now sold around the world.

Edition details

• Publisher: Tor Books
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0765344424
• ISBN 13: 9780765344427
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 672