Future Perfect

A critical device I probably rely on too much when I'm thinking about books and movies is "this thing is actually trying to be two different things and it's better at one of them so I kind of wish it was just that one," which my brain is presently applying to Wrath Goddess Sing, viz.: The moderately neat working out of a very 90s-SFF-mag-feeling cosmological sci-fantasy premise attached to what I'm beginning to suspect has become my favorite contemporary retelling of classical myth (and for the infinitely-tread ground of the Iliad, no less). It's not really a fair way of thinking because obviously it's not like the two frames the book looks at the world through are divorced from each other--arguably a major thematic concern of the book is the notion that this chapter of histiography near the end of the bronze age marks a turn away from the era where you could see the stories of men and gods sit conformably alongside each other in a narrative, and there are moments of the cosmology pushing into the common world that are delightfully creepy (I'm thinking here of Helen's magical intrusion on Achilles stable-hand and when we find out just what Iphigenia's deal is)--but at the same time, the book really does shine when it's doing speculative archaeology in a way few other retellings I've read have. Funnily enough, its last two chapters basically do deal with the threads separately, with an intellectually-satisfying conclusion to all the premises of the god-business in the penultimate chapter and, in the final chapter, earnest and timeless heartbreak.