Review! An Amazon's Equal by Fionna Guillaume

A beautiful story told with passion and finesse

Everything that we call Myth, people once believed as truth. They had to – because the world around them so outstripped their ability to comprehend it, only gods and magic could explain. In An Amazon’s Equal, Fionna Guillaume returns to the mythic storytelling tradition and uses her own kind of magic to get at truths we all sometimes sense, but often fail to believe in or live to their deserved extent.

The book tells the story of Pyrena, a young Amazon making her journey into womanhood along a path tradition has laid out for her – and then traveling further still. Though she fully accepts the ways and wisdom of the society that’s raised her, Pyrena just ever-so-slightly does not fit. The Euphemindra, as the Amazons call themselves, live in isolation from the world of men, defended by their own strength at arms and the blessing of the goddess they worship. In their deeply forested land, they have built a civilization that borders on utopia, its idyllic peace disturbed only when men of the outer world make the mistake of attempting invasion and conquest, forcing them to do battle – from which they never shy nor falter. But the ways of war come a hint less naturally to Pyrena than to her sister warriors, and she lives and matures with the most tenuous sense of something missing.

When a foolhardy Greek campaign against the Euphemindra ends in a thorough rout, new captives arrive at the Men’s Tent in the great Amazonian city. Pyrena captures one of these herself: Astrastos, a young man who embodies much of the fallacy and foolishness of his patriarchal homeland – but who, like Pyrena, has always walked just a hint out of step with his people and their expectations.

Like both Pyrena and Astrastos, this novel begins with an unassuming conformity to expectations: a coming-of-age story, a love story, a pitting of the feminine soul against masculine ambition. But also like its heroine and hero, from the very start it carries a hint of something more – something that grows and blooms under the skillful touch of its author page by page until it goes far beyond romantic tropes and retold legends. Almost without the reader noticing, a rich and magnetic cast of supporting characters ease their way into the story, painted with a few quick strokes as they first appear, then brushed with contour and texture and perspective in each subsequent return. The social order of the Euphemindra reveals itself with ever-deepening complexity and inventiveness. Themes of love and family and fidelity and honor coalesce, swell, and break loose in moments of emotional thunder. The expected happens – and then the unexpected follows straight upon its heels.

Fionna Guillaume renders all of this in a clean and forthright style that is lyrical when it needs to be and visceral when it must. The eroticism of her love scenes can simmer or flare, washing the reader in whatever level of heat is called for, but never obscuring the emotional crux of the storytelling.

By the end, she convinces us that the epic and the mythic are in truth matters of human spirit, there to be tapped and made use of if we can recognize them and choose a path that is right.