The Sweet Girl
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3.1 • 19 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A bold and captivating new novel of ancient Greece, from the celebrated, award-winning author of The Golden Mean.
Pythias is her father's daughter, with eyes his exact shade of unlovely, intelligent grey. A slave to his own curiosity and intellect, Aristotle has never been able to resist wit in another--even in a girl child who should be content with the kitchen, the loom and a life dictated by the womb. And oh his little Pytho is smart, able to best his own students in debate and match wits with a roomful of Athenian philosophers. Is she a freak or a harbinger of what women can really be? Pythias must suffer that argument, but she is also (mostly) secure in her father's regard.
But then Alexander dies a thousand miles from Athens, and sentiment turns against anyone associated with him, most especially his famous Macedonian-born teacher. Aristotle and his family are forced to flee to Chalcis, a garrison town. Ailing, mourning and broken in spirit, Aristotle soon dies. And his orphaned daughter, only 16, finds out that the world is a place of superstition, not logic, and that a girl can be played upon by gods and goddesses, as much as by grown men and women. To safely journey to a place in which she can be everything she truly is, Aristotle's daughter will need every ounce of wit she possesses, but also grace and the capacity to love.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
This hotly anticipated sequel continues the historical imagining of Aristotle’s life begun in the Giller Prize–winning The Golden Mean. Told from the perspective of Aristotle’s razor-sharp daughter, Pythias, it’s a captivating look at legendary figures from a tantalizingly human perspective, brushing out the people behind names usually found in textbooks. More intriguingly, it considers the archetypal philosopher from a female perspective at a time when women were essentially treated as property. As the story unfolds, Pythias slips past the bounds of her gender-defined role, triumphing over her father’s students in debates. But when Aristotle dies, she must use her smarts to survive as this riveting work of historical fiction unfolds.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lyon returns to ancient Greece for her second novel, this time focusing on Aristotle's daughter, Pythias. At the outset, she is seven years old and devoted to her famous father, curious about the world around her and displaying her father's powers of debate and observation. She chafes at woman's work and the limitations of her gender, a problem that only grows as she matures and finds herself caught between Aristotle's world of inquiry and the woman's world where she is expected to dwell. When Alexander the Great dies, Aristotle a fellow Macedonian and Alexander's teacher must flee to the countryside, where he dies. Aristotle's will dictates a course for the rest of his daughter's life including marriage to Nicanor, a distant cousin, which would entail surrendering to a domesticity for which Pythias, now a teenager, is too clever by half. Lyons writes the tale of Pythias's efforts to escape, and the price she must pay to claim the life she desires. Writing in the present tense, Lyon does a remarkable job of making Pythias, her ancient world, and her eternal problems raw and compelling. While this book necessarily lacks the surprising freshness of The Golden Mean, Lyons nonetheless lives up to her promise, delivering to readers a modern twist on the ancient world.
