Around 400 BCE, in Syracuse, Dumb and Dumber want to put on a play by Euripides.

They’ve got no actors, no costumes, no sets, no money and little to no intelligence. But, as they say, where there is a quarry filled with starving Athenian refugees, there’s a way.

Ursula K. Le Guin’s Greco-Roman mythical retelling from 2008, way before these kinds of novels became “cool” and everyone started writing them.

Lavinia tells the story of, well, Lavinia, a character in Vergil’s Aeneid who isn’t given any speaking lines. Lavinia being such a paper thin character gives Le Guin the opportunity to fill in the many gaps. And, to no one’s surprise, she’s done a great job of it.

Ash - A Secret History is by far the longest novel I’ve read. When I saw the thickness of the book, the number of lines on each page and the miniscule size of the font, I was scared that I wouldn’t be able to read through the whole thing.

All it took for me to get over that fear was reading the first few pages. Mary Gentle hooked me with her commitment to telling Ash’s story in a way that only she could and she refused to let go of me until the very end.