Ha, I was thinking of you writing this post, and wondering whether you'd read it!
I hadn't read any Sutcliff before, umm, six months ago? and I feel like it isn't too late, I still love them all madly -- the chief difference is that I think if I'd read them when I was a kid I would have reread them many times and they would have been a huge part of my psyche and literary landscape, the way The Dark is Rising is, or Pamela Dean's Tam Lin, or the Duane Wizard books... all of which, I think, if I'd come to them this year, I would have thought were really lovely, and then gone off and forgotten about them. Which is how I feel about Sutcliff. So I do wish I'd read her when I was a kid, but I do still love them. But YMMV.
But I wouldn't start with this one, maybe? Maybe one of the Roman Britain ones, like Eagle of the Ninth, something you're a little less likely to have strong feelings about? Because I do worry a little that with this particular one, your feelings about the original might get in the way. (Y Goddodin isn't one of the poems I know a great deal about, so I didn't have that problem.)
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I hadn't read any Sutcliff before, umm, six months ago? and I feel like it isn't too late, I still love them all madly -- the chief difference is that I think if I'd read them when I was a kid I would have reread them many times and they would have been a huge part of my psyche and literary landscape, the way The Dark is Rising is, or Pamela Dean's Tam Lin, or the Duane Wizard books... all of which, I think, if I'd come to them this year, I would have thought were really lovely, and then gone off and forgotten about them. Which is how I feel about Sutcliff. So I do wish I'd read her when I was a kid, but I do still love them. But YMMV.
But I wouldn't start with this one, maybe? Maybe one of the Roman Britain ones, like Eagle of the Ninth, something you're a little less likely to have strong feelings about? Because I do worry a little that with this particular one, your feelings about the original might get in the way. (Y Goddodin isn't one of the poems I know a great deal about, so I didn't have that problem.)