Judith Hand, Voice of the Goddess

An Epic of the Minoan Civilization

Pacific Rim Press, 1999 [Author's homepage, @amazon]

In two aspects this novel excels the others I know on the subject of Minoan Crete:

• The Author is able to describe Minoan life with profound knowledge and credible colorful diversity. This is pleasantly different from some other novels about this time, where the protagonists sometimes act like in empty space, because the world around them doesn't become real.
  Judith Hand takes pains to work out the authenticity of the setting and underscores this effort in a preface and a closing comment. From my perspective she succeeds quite well in doing so and could have done without this rather thin framework story, in which she acts as british antiquary J. Rosebrook Evans, who supposedly has deciphered the 3500 years old chronicles of Leesandra.
• I enjoyed not only the setting, but also the story itself. Leesandra and Alektrion, heroine and hero, have been separated in their adolescence. They go through many troubles, until finally they are united again in the moment of doom. The story is less corny than it sounds here, because Judith Hand describes real people and not just pale embodiments of somebody's prejudices about a distant era.
  Admittedly, this is another one of those stories heading - from its beginning - straight into the doom of the Minoan civilization, together with Thera eruption, Achaian take-over and destruction of matriarchal culture. This is the weakest point of the book, but it seems that no author writing about Minoan Crete is immune to this temptation.

Having had success with her novel, Judith Hand started to develop a rather duboius universal theory of biological peaceableness in women and belligerence in men, which she celebrates on her homepage and in lectures. I don't subscribe to her theories, but in any case, they don't affect the quality of her book.