A few of the comments I've gotten about Torn from Troy have remarked on the gore.  There's not that much, but yes, there are a few cases of people who have their brains dashed out, get sliced open in battle, or are just killed and eaten.

None of this violence is gratuitous.  It all serves to make a point – the casual brutality of bronze-age warfare, the unpreparedness of the Greeks at Ismaros, or the barbarity of the Cyclops and the contempt in which it holds humans, for example.

We have this notion that our children are shrinking violets who must be carefully sheltered from any exposure to bad things, at least until they move out into the real world, for which their innocent upbringing will no doubt have prepared them perfectly.

As you can tell, I doubt it.  Children aren't naturally squeamish, at least in my experience, though many learn squeamishness from their parents or peers ("Oooh!  A nice girl like you won't want to touch that yucky stuff!").  On the contrary, yucky things intrigue most children.  And why shouldn't they?  The movie Stand By Me captures it perfectly – four boys make a lengthy trip, just to go and see a dead body, and perhaps poke it with a stick.

It's worth adding that this novel covers a very violent event – the sack of Troy and its aftermath.  Bronze age warfare was brutal.  No snipers taking out people at 300 metres, or cruise missiles destroying "targets" from a hundred miles away.  Battles in that era were intensely personal – stabbing or spearing the guy directly in front of you.  Any depiction of these events that didn't have a few detached body parts would be like a description of Antarctica that didn't mention snow.

I'm quite pleased with the violence in Torn from Troy.  There's enough to give the reader a sense of the brutality of the era, without overwhelming or distracting from the plot.  I hope you'll feel the same way.