A review by tintinintibet
The King Must Die by Mary Renault

4.0

TKMD was a recommendation from my 6th grade teacher, and re-reading it 30+ years later I suspect we each (me now, me then, teacher) read and/or remember a very different book. Maybe I’m overthinking this like my daughter claims I’m doing with Harry Potter (as that story turns super dark in book 5 The Order of the Phoenix). Guilty: there’s more subtlety, nuance, gray, and color in TKMD; there’s more us-vs-them, flight-or-fight, manufactured outrage and sadistic evil in Harry Potter.