When In Rome...

I'm not sure I'd want to "do as the Romans do", at least not by Ancient Roman standards! Love is a beautiful thing, but how promising is it, when one person is a gladiator, condemned to death but allowed to live as long as he gives a good show in the arena, and the other is a house servant, once an educated girl from a respected family, but now enslaved and forced to do the bidding of the most ungrateful, spoiled biddy in town? Such is the question in Kate Quinn's historical fiction novel, Mistress of Rome. And before ye judge, no, this is not the standard supermarket bodice-ripper you may be imagining. This is actually a pretty well-researched historical novel, giving the reader a full on view of what it might have been like to live in those times, for ALL classes. We just learn about the world from the perspectives of Thea, a Jewish slave owned by bratty heiress Lepida, and Arius, the gladiator.

author Kate Quinn

image courtesy of GoodReads.com

As fictional romances typically go, of course Thea and Arius have an instant connection, though actually meeting up takes some work. Luckily, Thea's mistress, Lepida, develops an infatuation with Arius and constantly sends Thea to the gladiator quarters with secret messages.  Over time, Thea's return trips back home take longer and longer (*wink, wink). It takes awhile for Lepida to catch on to what's going on, why her messages are never being answered by Arius, but once she does figure it out, she goes full-blown evil and finds a nasty way to split Arius and Thea apart. To spare you the spoilers / complete details of Lepida's sinister scheming, I will just say they end up spending years apart before finding each other again. By that time, Thea has a different sort of job, living in a different town, while Lepida naturally goes on to marry for money (to senator / bookworm Marcus Norbanus) and have an "oops" child she doesn't want or like. As the reader, you'll probably want to throttle Lepida, as I did, when you see how poorly she treats good-hearted Marcus. Never ceases to amaze me how the good guys always seem to fall right into the snares of the cruelest women. As for Arius, he finds his Thea in an odd relationship with Emperor Domitian (one that proves beneficial, in sort of a business-like way, to both Thea and Domitian). There's one other big surprise for Arius when he reunites with Thea but you'll have to read to find out

 :-)

Roman Woman

Imprisoned Roman

I loved the complexity of all of these characters. The evil ones were over the top evil, the good were  noble in character but lived a flawed reality, which I found refreshing. I like that sort of realism, even in fiction. Arius has a streak of rage he constantly battles, but he centers it and does his best to avoid bringing unneccessary  harm to the innocent (doesn't always succeed, but he does try!). He spends much of the novel trying to win a rudius from the emperor (a wooden sword emperors gave out to certain prisoners who had won favor with them. Obtaining a rudius meant you were pardoned of your crimes, your freedom reinstated). Emperor Domitian, on the other hand, starts out as a respectable character but then his straight up whacked out crazy starts to come out more as the novel progresses. That guy is into some twisted, twisted stuff. The way Quinn wrote Domitian makes me think she was inspired by the real-life Roman Emperor, Caligula, who also started out as a respected ruler but became more well known for his depravity and drunken orgies (not saying there's anything wrong with one in it's own place and time --- Zoolander, anyone?  :-P --- just noticed the similarity). And wouldn't you know, here comes Lepida again with an interest in Domitian this time. Poor Thea can't shake that witch off!

She's beautiful. She's even sort of interesting, like the way poisonous snakes are interesting. But she's awful. ~~ Vibia Sabina, daughter of Lepida & Marcus, talking about her own mother!

 "A Classical Beauty" by John William Godward 

Because no one ever notices me, you'd be surprised how much I hear. ~~Vibia Sabina

I was really impressed with all the strong female characters in this book. Often, with historical fiction anyway, you find maybe one strong woman in the book with everyone else telling her to pipe down. In this book, good or bad, all the women seemed to have strong voices and had the men actually listening to them, even Thea, being a slave girl, earned respect from many. I found the Empress really admirable. You don't hear much from her through most of the novel, other than the rumors going around about her, but by the end you find out she's actually a pretty ballzy, spirited woman who did what she had to do to survive a maniac for a husband. You also find out she has a sense of humor about the whole thing, even though she admits she feared for her life at times. Also, Calpurnia, the bethrothed of Marcus' son (from an earlier marriage) becomes a fun character once she learns to speak her mind without fear. I loved it whenever she put Lepida in her place!

I wouldn't say there are any HUGE surprises in the plot, but enough twists and turns to keep the historical fiction fan entertained. :-)  Looking forward to when I have a chance to read Kate Quinn's second novel, Daughters of Rome.

"ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED??" ~ Russell Crow in Gladiator

The midday executions dragged past, and then the gladiators marched through the Gate Of Life in their purple cloaks, pairing off for preliminary fights. My {Lepida's}daughter leaned forward, her eyes bending on the muscled armored figures. I looked at her irritably. "Since when is Little Lady Squeamish a gladiator fan?" "I'm not," she said, eyes still fixed on the arena. "I went for the first time at Matralia, and it was fairly awful. But it is interesting." I {Lepida} brushed a fly away from my wine cup. "You've got a crush on a trident fighter, I suppose."  "No...it's just that the gladiators are supposed to care about dying well, and all they care about is not dying at all." Her eyes traveled from the arena to the packed tiers of the Colosseum., the laughing, cheering crowds of plebs and patricians alike. "People don't seem to see that."

Roman couple

Southern Lit. Quick Read

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances and one man in his time plays many parts. 

~~ William Shakespeare's As You Like It

For those who like dark Southern lit. murder mystery type books, this one is a fun way to pass a lazy afternoon. The Drifter's Wheel is part of Philip DePoy's Fever Devlin series. The story takes place in Blue Mountain, Georgia where Dr. Fever Devlin is a college professor, scholar and expert in Southern Folklore. His expertise in this field leads him to become part of many crime scene investigations involving the local mountain folks. Quirky character detail I noticed -- Devlin is described as commonly wearing different clothing combinations involving the colors "rust" (I'm guessing a dark orange) and black. Never really explained why only these colors seem to come up so much, but interesting, I thought :-P

author Philip DePoy

The plot, which covers Civil War era through modern times, can be confusing in parts. A mystery man busts into Devlin's home and tells him this wild story of how he is a Civil War soldier (and, in one of his stories, a relative of Stonewall Jackson) guilty of killing his brother (whose body is later found near the estate lands of one of Devlin's neighbors, thus bringing about the murder mystery part of the story). Devlin, called in to help with the murder investigation, comes to find out that the same mystery man visited Devlin's fiancee, Lucinda and Hovis Daniel, an eccentric old man considered crazy by most Blue Mountain locals. Tricky part of the story is the mystery man gives different versions of his story and different clues to his true identity (including identifying himself by different names) to all three people. That's where the story can get confusing, trying to keep track of all the different stories and identities for the same guy. It's also part of the fun though. 

nurse

Lucinda was the head nurse at the county hospital. If she had been born a hundred years earlier, she would have been the midwife of our town -- two hundred years earlier and she might have been its witch. Long out of high school and college, she somehow had managed to maintain not only a student's looks but also an enthusiasm for learning new things I found absolutely fascinating. Her desire to gather new ideas was the perfect compliment to my passion for discovering old ones. There seemed to be no end in the things we found in common, or the joy we found in sharing those things. 

I loved all the history incorporated into the story. I particularly love stories that teach me something new about a part of history I didn't know before. In this story, that was the case with Devlin's study of the Hutchinson Family Singers, a group of Civil War era singers whose songs focused on abolition of slavery, womens' rights, political activism and the like -- they were also the original war protesters, loooong before hippies thought to fight the Vietnam war with enthusiastic rounds of Kumbaya.  I don't remember reading about them before but apparently they were THE group to see back in the 1840s. Sample of one of their songs below:

 By the time Andrews got home, I'd spent a very frustrating five hours, on and off, going from one web site to another without finding anything of use. It had only exacerbated my primary objection to internet research : a million miles wide and half an inch deep. {Pretty much how my internet research typically goes!}

There's even a science lesson or two here:

Mushrooms illuminated by the chemical Luciferin

photo by Mainichi Shimbun

Not photoshopped! This actually happens naturally 

via same chemical reaction that lights up firefly butts! :-)

In the book, this process is explained with Fever 

coming across Foxfire plants:

Foxfire plant

It's usually called foxfire -- a bioluminescence created by a certain sort of fungus or lichen. You find it on decaying wood. I used to believe it was primarily a product of only one species of the genus Armillaria, but over the years I think I've found as many as forty individual species. It exists everywhere. Pliny and Aristotle mention it. Ben Franklin suggested that the military use it to light the inside of one of our first submarines. Believe it or not, it's a substance called luciferin -- same thing that lights up a firefly -- reacts with an enzyme, luciferase, and that causes the luciferin to oxidize and make light. 

So there ya go... any of you who ever wondered how fireflies work... :-) Might take some of the mystique away from the little guys but they're still fun to watch!

Fireflies

There's a humorous observation on human behavior after Fever explains luciferin to his best friend and fellow professor Winton Andrews during a midnight hike through the woods to search for something pertaining to the investigation. Fever mentions the need to be careful as to not alarm bears in the area and notices in Winton:

And there it was: the human aversion to anything unfamiliar. Andrews, like most people, would rather face a real bear than imaginary fire. He understood what a bear was; he had no idea what made the fungus glow -- even though I had offered a perfectly good scientific explanation. He'd seen bears a hundred times. He'd seen foxfire twice. And even though the bear was a certain danger and the luminescent fungus would never attack him, rake him with claws, or bite him with teeth, Andrews preferred the bear. 

DePoy also hits upon the beauty of history, through his elderly character, Hovis:

...the old days. That's what I know best. There's not a single today in life that can beat a really great yesterday. And do you know why? Because yesterday is polished by the rags of memory, and it shines brighter, glows warmer. Hell. A man my age, especially, is more like to recall a penny's worth of ten-years-ago than a dollar's worth of earlier-today. 

graphic courtesy of  The Graphics Fairy

:-) Just love that!