"Thirty years ago, Jong hot-wired American fiction with her galvanizing first novel, Fear of Flying, and she’s been writing with great moxie about women, sexuality, love, and misogyny ever since. Along the way, she has developed a unique style of historical fiction that combines precisely rendered settings with archly humorous social critiques and exuberant sensuality, a mode perfectly suited for this highly imaginative, sexy, and shrewd interpretation of the life of the first know woman poet, Sappho, who lived on the island of Lesbos 2,600 years ago and wrote and performed poems of indelible candor and eroticism. Jong envisions Sappho as an ardent and adventurous soul who, while still in her teens, meets the love of her life (the rebel poet Alcaeus), reveals her poetic talents, and is forced into exile and marriage to a wealthy old drunk. After being widowed and loosing custody of her beloved daughter, Sappho, despondent but ever valiant and resourceful, embarks on an elaborate odyssey a la Homer, accompanied by her female slave and lover, Praxinoa, and steadfast admirer and friend Aesop, of fable fame. Sappho survives shipwrecks, sorceresses, crooks, and tyrants, and visits the lands of the Amazons and the Centaurs, the oracle at Delphi, and the underworld, all under the avid eyes of Aphrodite, who insists that "a woman singer can be as great as any man," and Zeus who rejoins, "but I bet she throws it all away for the love of an unworthy man." As Sappho loves women and men alike, and saves lives with her poetry and quick thinking, Jong offers sly commentary on everything from slavery to superstition, greed, lust, vanity, deceit, age, and artistic freedom in a tale that is at once enormously entertaining and wisely provocative." --Donna Seaman

Kirkus' Review for Sappho's Leap

Read more about Sappho's Leap

"The feminist maverick who's been tweaking sexual conventions ever since Fear of Flying (1973) now reimagines the life and numerous loves of the seventh-century (b.c.) Greek poetess.

Sappho herself narrates, in another deconstructive romp akin to Fanny (1980) and Serenissima (1987), at the moment when she's standing on a seaside cliff about to "leap" to her death. Her story begins on the island of Lesbos, where she grows up a devotee of the goddess Aphrodite, who grants Sappho "gifts of immortal song." She falls in love with the handsome singer Alcaeus, who fathers her daughter Cleis (even though he prefers boys), and colludes with her in opposing the tyrant Pittacus, which sends her into exile. This allows Jong to parade her (quite impressive) research into classical culture and legend, as the politically and increasingly sexually conflicted adventuress undertakes an odyssey at least as arduous as Odysseus's. As Aphrodite and her randy father Zeus look down from Mount Olympus and comment on Sappho's peregrinations, she endures arranged marriage to the moribund merchant Cerclas, then sails about the known and unknown worlds, consulting the Oracle of Delphi, matching wits in Egypt with the notorious courtesan Rhodopis (who's extorting their family's fortune from Sappho's lovestruck brothers), and accompanied by the taciturn slave- abulist Aesop detours among the Amazons (whose queen commands the noted singer to compose a celebratory Amazoniad), the Islands of the Philosophers and Centaurs, respectively, even the Land of the Dead. Eventually reunited with Cleis, Sappho settles into celebrity status and middle age, until a virile young ferryman rekindles the familiar flames. Much of this is highly entertaining, and the sexuberantly anachronistic one-liners are sometimes wonderful ("Unless they [men] are castrated, their brains do not function properly"), sometimes effulgently absurd ("My longing for Cleis became the worm in the golden apple of our love"). But it does go on.

Nevertheless: one of Jong's most enjoyable books." --Kirkus Reviews