I love Erica Jong's writing and this was lovely: an ancient Mediterranean setting brought to life with Greek mythological characters and real historical characters. She imagines Sappho as a good yet flawed woman, gifted with a "divine" voice, devotee of Aphrodite. Sappho has many lovers and adventures, a few shipwrecks and heart-breaks. Some historical persons who make an appearance are Aesop the fable-maker, and Jezebel the evil queen who worshiped Baal. Zeus and Aphrodite comment on Sappho's life as they observe her trials.

Normally I love Erica Jong's work, but I found this one flat. The inclusion of Sappho's work in the text felt more like a grad student citing their work than an integral part of the story. The characters were oddly lacking in dimension, and their stories, despite having some pretty extreme highs and lows, were devoid of anything I could connect to.

Erica Jong has written three books that used historical or literary figures as their basis (Sappho's Leap, Serenissima, and Fanny). All three were enjoyable, imaginative and well researched. Sappho's Leap is the story of Sappho's odyssey as she grows from teenager to a grandmother provides a fantastical tale of the many adventures she had along the way. It is the story of a woman's journey, not only physically, but also to self knowledge. Like Homer, she encounters many mythical creatures along the way; their stories were well imagined and entertaining.

Surprisingly for Jong, this story of the passionate Sappho, who loved both men and women, focused more on romance than sex. One legend is that Sappho threw herself off a cliff in middle age at the betrayal of a handsome, young ferryman named Phaon. Jong provides a convincingly alternate view, and an interesting (and seemingly realistic) perspective on the nature of an older women's affair with a much younger, vain man who seeks to make use of her fame.

The story also incorporates several Greek gods as characters, illuminating their place in the cosmos of storytelling history.

Interesting fictionalized view about a historical figure I didn't know very much about before reading this, beyond the fact that she was a poet and a lover of men as well as women. I especially liked the little asides from the gods. I loved how someone so long dead was made to feel so alive in this story and so human and relatable.

Story 3.2 /5
Audio Narration 1.5 /5

I just finished the incredible Circe by Madeline Miller before reading this, so that definitely colored my review. The writing in Sappho's Leap was too stilted, trying so hard to be formal, and faux-antiquated, while still painting a beautifully detailed, sensual epic. The end was too sudden, but I loved reading both Sappho's interspersed poetry, and Jong's poetry at the end.

I'm normally so stoked when the author narrates the audiobook, but Jong's narration only emphasized the sometimes overly-dramatic scenes, and her voice took away from the lyrical quality of her description.

I'm looking forward to reading more about Sappho (what little we know of her - elusive facts and mostly myth) Check out Circe by Madeline Miller, though!

2,600 years ago on the island of Lesbos in the great age when trade blossomed in the eastern Mediterranean there lived an actual woman who's songs survive to this day - on scraps of parchment and in the legends passed on through the ages. Sappho was known throughout this ancient world and her songs say much about the unchanging nature of love and lust, of power and wisdom. Jong has researched her character well and has woven a story of her life that is compelling and informative. How this woman could have attained such fame and power in a world generally misogynist in the time of the building of the great sphinx's of Egypt, the advent of the great city states like Sparta and Athens, when learned men traveled to the oracle at Delphi to sort out truths from the myriad of gods and goddesses of the region is a compelling mystery and Jong does an admirable job weaving plausible truth from this time straddling the modern world and pre-history.

"I think of all the daughters who died in childbirth, all the granddaughters who died trying to come into this world of darkness and light - and I rejoice for you - despite the treachery of men...It is not so bad - this gift the gods gave us. It is a mixture of pain and pleasure, of sweets and bitters, like all gifts, but it is our to keep awhile and revel in."

I don’t write reviews but if I can keep someone from reading this it’ll be worth it.

This book is an insult to Sappho’s memory. Not only because it revolves around Sappho moping around for Alcaeus (and don’t get me wrong, that was also ridiculous) but mostly because it’s very poorly written. The writing is inexcusably bad.

The ‘erotic’ scenes made me nauseous and the romance was dull, rushed, and boring. Sappho and Alcaeus have insta-love and there is no reason given for them to love each other. The central themes of Alcaeus’s poems/songs are his political beliefs, war, and drinking. Sappho’s main themes are love and women. What drives them together? Erica Jong doesn’t know and neither will you. But you’ll be forced to listen to her whine about missing him, even though he’s an unappealing asshole.

Unless you understand the history of men undermining Sappho’s sexuality, you may not get why I’m so offended by the plot of this book. Jong has Sappho marry Cercylas of Andros despite the general consensus of modern scholars who acknowledge that the name was a pun meant to make fun of Sappho’s lesbianism (Cercylas is slang for male genitalia and Andros means man, ie Dick of Man Island). The existence of Phaon is laughable as it was only mentioned in dramaticized versions of Sappho’s life to consolidate her attraction to women with a fatal frenzied love for some man that drove her to suicide. Her relationship with Alcaeus was only rumored hundreds of years after her death because they lived in the same place at the same time. It seems Jong wanted to write a straight romance set in Ancient Greece, but couldn’t she have picked someone else if that’s what she wanted? Why bring Aesop into this? It’s so bizarre.

Of Sappho’s surviving poetry, she only names women as lovers. It seems Jong didn’t read any Sappho. Where is Atthis, Gongyla, Anactoria, Abanthis, etc etc? She makes up an enslaved woman as Sappho’s brief romance and leaves it at that. Sappho writes extensively for her love for a woman named Atthis, who was her childhood friend and subject of many poems. She’s reduced to one of Sappho’s sexual exploits. Jong doesn’t care though. It must be sexier to replace Atthis with Alcaeus to her.

I would forgive the creative freedoms she took if the writing or characterization was any good, but it’s not. The narrator, a middle-aged Sappho, never explains anything while skipping from topic to topic. The plot makes no sense. Jong must have looked up interesting places and things in Archaic Greece and just stitched them together with loose connectors. The plot makes no sense and does no hommage to Sappho’s poetry. Jong must have thought Ancient Egypt would be sexy so she needed that in her plot too. None of it makes sense.

She also has Sappho put down other women in a very problematic way. Jong was a prominent second wave feminist in the 70s but seems to have not matured past putting down feminine women who like nice things. I’d like to show her several poems where Sappho talks about wanting certain fashionable clothes and fawns over well-dressed women.

At least Jong did some research on Pittacus and the politics of Mytilene, not that it’s well-written or explained coherently.

Don’t read this if you’re gay, smart, or both. It belongs in a supermarket with a shirtless man with glistening abs on the cover. Also, she calls female genitalia a “delta”, which I can’t read with a straight face.

Parts of this are very good, but I have to confess that Jong lost me when the story turns fantastical - it was going along nicely with the straightforward historical with light mythological overtones, so the turnoff to head into the underworld is a sharp one. I'm fine with either one, the other, or both interwoven smoothly; slapping the concepts together like a poorly made layer cake is less fine.

This book is well written, but I do not recommend it to those who are not prone to a book filled with....numerous....romantic interludes. The story is that of poet Sappho who is seduced by poet Alcaeus. All sorts of plots, overthrows, love trysts emerge, taking them both through Delphi to Egypt to the Amazon, and naturally to Hades. Jong translates many of Sappho's poems, and this was the hook for me.

One of the first books i’ve read about greek retellings and after years i still adore it.

I know that not much is known about the poet Sappho, and we have to piece together the story of her life from the small clips of her work that we have and references to her in other works. However, for a figure who wrote thousands of lines of poetry about love (and significant portions of that being understood as wlw poetry), Erica Jong made the interesting decision to focus her love story primarily on her first love, the father of her only child, Alcaeus. There are certainly references to her loving several people, men and women, but I have a hard time believing that someone who is a disciple of Aphrodite spends decades of her life pining for the love of the first man she ever loved. It's giving third-wave feminism written by a cishet white woman. I think I was hoping for something a little more similar to Song of Achilles, but alas.

Just finished this. It was almost-brilliant, falling just short of brilliance across the board. Insufficient supporting character development, and patchy, insufficient plotting (in particular the poorly-realized nonsense with the Amazons and centaurs, which had so much unrealized potential). Too hasty a resolution of the period on the unnamed island. Too many loose ends--the Pharoah in particular, and how Alcaus and Praxinoa came to be in the right boat at the right time at the end there. She spends 2/3 of the book having Sappho long for Alcaus, and then completely fails to develop his character at all when he finally shows up. He remains unknown to the reader, a good looking guy with no apparent personality, since there is so little interaction, so little real detail to go on. That's probably the most major disappointment.

Other aspects of the story are well-handled: Sappho's school of poetry and temple to Aphrodite; the clever interpollation of interaction between Aphrodite and Zeus that affects Sappho's life; Praxinoa's and Cleis' character development; the descriptions of places in the Agean and the effects of place on the characters lives, needs and wants.