[Sherwood Smith's Twice a Prince is released today. Hopefully review tomorrow!]

Apparently Tobias Druitt is the pseudonym of Diane Purkiss and Michael Dowling; they’re mother and son. She’s an Oxford tutor (professor-type); he’s thirteen (probably fifteen by now) and supposedly a Child Genius. They have published a trilogy (of the which this is the first book) and are working on a next book that involves Tarot cards. This volume was released in 2005; the following volumes came out in 2006 and 2007. Diane Purkiss apparently enjoys baking bread, and Michael Dowling’s favorite colors are dark red and black, because they’re macabre.

Corydon is, so he thinks, a normal shepherd boy, but he has one goat leg, and his city threw him out as a scapegoat because of this. He gets captured by pirates shortly after that — pirates who are putting together a freak show full of monsters. There end up being about ten monsters on the island, including Medusa, the sphinx, and Lady Nagaina (who has five heads). Eventually Corydon helps them escape, but the leader of the pirates finds Perseus and convinces him that there’s a good reason to go kill all the monsters. Thus begins a war. At the same time, Corydon is trying to figure out who he is, since he’d never really considered it very much before then. Why does he have a goat-leg, and why do so many people feel that he’s the prophesied one?

The book is told in omniscient third person, mostly focusing on Corydon and Perseus. The Corydon parts are bittersweet and mostly without humor, but the Perseus parts are strongly steeped in irony and sarcasm. I enjoyed it, although there were occasional burst-the-fourth-wall moments of anachronism. As amusing as they were, occasionally they’d throw me out of the story. Generally speaking, they used them well, though. On the other hand, the vocabulary was a little odd. The authors would use various Greek terms (pharmakos, haima) for various concepts (scapegoat, blood), but then they’d use the word ‘freak’ in a context as a twentieth or twenty-first-century person would. I understand the word isn’t exactly new, but sometimes their phrasing would slide into what I read as slang.

Medusa is probably the best character in the book. Corydon is fairly obviously just the Hero; as far as that goes, he’s basically wallpaper paste. I didn’t really have any good reason to like or dislike him. Medusa, on the other hand, grew a lot as a character; she had motivation other than just to save the world, and hers was a very conflicted character. Not every single thing she did was actually good, despite the fact that it might have looked ‘bad’ at some point (unlike Corydon). There were other characters I enjoyed, including Kharmindes and the other two Gorgons; they were all more complicated and more personable than Corydon.

All that having been said, it was an enjoyable, straightforward romp; there were parts of it that might have philosophical underpinnings (the nature of monsters and the idea of scapegoats). I can’t say the book particularly made me think, but just as a story, it was fun. There was, however, a significant amount of death and even some sex that was merely mentioned (completely euphemistically) but integral to the plot. That, plus its short length and fairly young protagonist (although I have no idea how old he actually was; his relationship with Medusa was ambiguous) would suggest that it might be a middle-readers book, but I’d recommend it more towards the top of that age range or to YAs. It was interesting, though, to see the Greek gods and heroes as the bad guys. 4/5 stars.