Last of the Amazons by Steven Pressfield

Warrior princess happiness

May 20, 2025

Categorization: Fantasy

Subcategory: Historical Fiction (kind of, I think, I don’t know, I’m not an expert, isn’t Theseus a mythological person only? I had to Google it and I am still not sure)

Where read: Old paperback

Non-spoiler review.

My dad hailed me to his house one Sunday and ordered me to clean out all my crappy and dilapidated books from decades ago, as I had no space for them in the tiny studio I could afford in the first years after I started work, and conveniently forgot about them afterwards (for starter yuppies free storage space is nothing to sneeze at).

As I was storing them into the rapidly dwindling shelves I have in my now grown-up house, I realized that I no longer remember (I had lost the plot?) of a lot of these books, and so decided to “shop my stash”. Nice right! From the interweb, I can see that this is a trendy thing to do, being sustainable and thrifty and makes one a mindful consumer or is anti-consumerism and therefore environmentally-friendly, or something. Although I don’t really see how this would have applied since I would have purchased the book on Kindle… saving electricity maybe? But no matter! I bought myself a nice new reading booklight on Amazon and settled in with the first physical paperback book I dug up that I vaguely remember enjoying decades ago but for the life of me could not recall a word of – The Last of the Amazons by Steven Pressfield.

Fast forward a week later, and I am now smack dab in The Last of the Amazons and it has reinforced my belief that one’s individual reading and understanding of a book will change depending on where one is in one’s life. This is the only reason I can think of which would explain why I could have forgotten The Last of the Amazons after reading it as a teenager. I think it simply didn’t resonate with me at the time.

But I guess reading it again now, with the renaissance of the fighting princess concept in popular media (see my post on the Snow White movie here and another one on this great book The Hero and the Crown here) especially in movies and TV (I also just saw Damsel on Netflix and Raya and the Last Dragon on Disney)  and me being in my thirties and having a little tiny daughter whom I adore and want to protect from the world, this book does not just resonate, it has completely transported me. I am obsessed with this book and the Amazon women in it, who in my head all look like this (although the book clearly describes them as... not looking like this).

If you know who this is, then congratulations, you are definitely an elder millennial.

Anyway, can I just make a point of praising how beautifully this book is written? Like, how on earth did Steven Pressfield manage to write like this? In theme, I can only describe him as having been moved by the Muses.  Parts of the book are written from the point of view of an Amazonian warrior, and the way he writes, incredibly, sounds like it has been translated from some wild, warlike, pagan language. And damned if I know how he did that because how on earth do I know what an Amazonian warrior sounds like?? The very grammar he used to chronicle the life and times of his mythological Amazonian warrioresses sound like savage poetry. Serious amazeballs. Even the parts of the book which are from the point of view of an Greek sound, for lack of a better, ancient. This guy just from his bald-faced talent, transformed English, modern day English, to sound vaguely antiquated and “translated” from ancient Greek (again, damned if I know how to do that because I don’t effing read any ancient languages), and as a consequence, made the book a multi-dimensional immersive experience.

As an aside, have you ever wondered why the Amazon river in South America is called the Amazon river? This struck me as curious as I was reading the book, I mean, because obviously, the Amazons lived near Greece, and the Amazon river is…far away… (guess who is not winning a Pulitzer anytime soon?) and after a quick google, it turns out that the Spanish explorer who named the Amazon river did so after seeing war-like women living near it. Cute.

Anyway.

I have always thought that one of the main things that set the great writers apart is their ability in their books to make each individual character have a unique way of speaking. I cannot fathom the incredible creativity and genius it takes to invent a different grammar and style and dialect almost of using words and vocabulary for each character, such that the character’s dialogue is immediately recognizable just from the way he or she talks. Some authors that immediately come to mind who are gifted at this art… George R. R. Martin, Jane Austen, J.K. Rowling, Margaret Mitchell, Tolkien, Truman Capote, I’m sure there are more, but these are the ones I can recall at a drop of a hat.

Oh yeah Helen Fielding! I love the way she writes.

It is truly incredible how he was able to realistically conjure the point of view of a solitary, female warrior embodiment of Ares the God of War. And I say warrior and not “soldier”, because the word “soldier” implies to me a cog in the great machine that is an army, fighting for the aims of his generals and men above him. Pressfield’s Amazons, as he has beautifully conveyed, fight for themselves and their own way of life, fight as a unit and as a team, but always independent and proud. His descriptions of their culture and way of life and their morbid, haunting beliefs sent shivers down my spine. I could not put the book down.

And that’s all I want to say about this book, any more would ruin it. But this is definitely worth the read, if only for the gratifying descriptions of what it would be like to be an Amazon woman. Like, I think the scary thing the book made me realize is that some part of me wants to be a completely psycho Amazon woman who smells like a horse, wears leopard fur to keep warm, answers to nobody, can draw a bow while standing on a saddle, and takes the scalps of her enemies as trophies. Like, these were the actual things I thought of the next morning after a late night reading the book, while I was stuck in traffic and driving to work and when I was at lunch or spacing out during my meeting. I mean, does every woman I see in a pencil skirt and heels riding the office elevator just want in the middle of their humdrum life to escape into an alternate reality, and this alternate reality is a completely cuckoobananacakes (as my daughter would say) other life of a savage living-off-the-land warrior princess??

I like to think so.

Last of the Amazons by Steven Pressfield