Rating: WARTY!
Erratum:
"listened to the laugher" should be, presumably, " listened to the laughter" While the former does make sense, it seemed, in context, to be more the latter that was required.
I began this advance review copy thinking it was about Julius Caesar's family, but in fact it was about the successor to Caesar, Gaius Octavius, popularly known as Octavian, who ruled in Rome's second triumvirate after Caesar was assassinated in 44BC. He defeated the other two legs of the triumvirate when it started breaking apart, and routed Marcus Antonius and Cleopatra 7th's fleet at the battle of Actium, after which the latter two committed suicide, MA by falling on his sword, and Cleo not by a snake bite as is popularly believed (and to which this author evidently subscribes), but by taking poison. Their story was actually rather Romeo and Juliet-esque in its comedy of error. But this novel isn't about them unfortunately.
Palatine Hill is the center one of the so-called seven hills of Rome. It's close by the Tiber, and has been settled since around 10,000BC. Technically there are only four actual hills of Rome. The other three are really promontories of a larger mass. Palatine, from whence comes our word 'palace', was actually where Livia, wife of Octavian, lived. She is one of the three women which this story follows, the other two being Octavian's daughter, Julia the Elder, and his 'adopted daughter', Cleopatra Selene, aka Cleopatra 8th who started out as a prisoner of war, her brothers all dead, and went on to a career which outshone her mother's, yet she's nowhere near as well-known. Go figure. History isn't so much written by the victors as it is the romantics! LOL!
These women all feel threatened in one way or another. Julia is set to wed Marcellus, who is a complete dick, but fortunately history shows us she did not have to put up with him for long. She is shallow and juvenile, and I found her uninteresting. Cleo understandably lives in fear of being killed off, since she's a prisoner of war for all practical purposes and risks being murdered if she's seen to pose any threat at all. She turned out to be as shallow as Julia was depicted. Perhaps the most interesting is Livia, Julia's step mom, who immediately shows herself to be a thoughtful and practical woman who knows how to play the political game even though, ultimately, women had very little real say in their lives in this world.
There were some errors in the historical information. For example, at one point, Julia says, "I stood there in my night shift", but Romans did not have a négligé, pajamas or 'night shifts'. They wore their underwear known as a tunica, taken from the Greeks (not literally! LOL!), or they would even wear their entire daytime outfit to bed, even the wealthy ones, so this seemed a bit out of place. Maybe tunica is was what was meant here. Another issue was also tied to Julia - she kept on fretting that her father was in Spain and wouldn't be there to 'give her away' on her wedding day, but this was not a tradition in Roman times.
If anyone could be said to give a bride away, it was a married woman who had not been married more than once, and the groom was supposed to 'wrench' his bride from her in a symbolic ritual representing taking ownership of the young virgin. Roman ceremonies were not like modern western ceremonies. Even the cake was not a cake as we perceive it, with white frosting and so on, but an offering to the gods of a grain 'cake', which was subsequently eaten by the bride and groom. For all we know it was some sort of a granola bar in effect! The bride did wear white (assuming her family could afford anything truly white), but the marriage ceremony was really a transfer of ownership of the bride from her family to the groom, and dad took very little formal part in it. The bride was supposed to travel to the groom's home signifying a break from her family and a joining of the groom's family.
Of course that did not mean that all relations with her family were severed, but in this case there is no divide at all and everything stays the same. Julia hangs around the First Citizen's home, which in this case is somewhat understandable because the groom evidently lived there too (she was his cousin). Given how wealthy Octavian was, it's hard to believe that the newly married couple did not have their own home. Worse than this though, she was invited to important meetings, which seemed highly unlikely given how women were viewed in Rome - pretty much solely as incubators for their husband's male heir.
There are always exceptions of course (as Boudiga all too briefly taught the Romans), but women were not considered to be part of the Roman men's political world any more than they were part of the military one, and while some of them no doubt shared many confidences with their husbands, it's highly unlikely that a fourteen year old girl, even one married to an relatively important man, would be invited to a power-brokering meeting! This is one of many problems with telling a story in first person PoV. If one of the three characters telling this tale in round-robin fashion isn't present, we can't know what happened, so you have to have women going to meetings to which, realistically, they would never have been invited, and there goes suspension of disbelief.
The blurb (which I know typically has nothing to do with the author thank goodness!) tells us: "Always suppressing their own desires for the good of Rome, each must fulfill her role." This is a despicable lie! There is no point at which any of these women suppresses her own desires. The entire story is precisely about them yielding to desire at every opportunity! It would have been truly boring otherwise. I do agree, though, that Livia is "astute." She's definitely my favorite. The other two are too juvenile and self-absorbed to be interesting.
It's thoroughly dishonest though, to claim that Julia has to deny "her craving for love and the pleasures of the flesh" Far from it! She indulges shamelessly, although her purportedly erotic scenes with her husband are really not very interesting. "Can they survive Rome's deadly intrigues?" Of course they can! What a dumb question! Why do blurb writers always write such patently absurd questions? Of course the hero succeeds. Of course the quest is successful! Of course true love wins! Of course the villain is brought to book. Do the blurb writers really think we're on tenterhooks because we don't know exactly how this will pan out ninety-nine times out of a hundred - especially given that this is historical fiction about real people, all of whom we know the fate?!
I ended up getting about 30% into this before I gave up on it because it was simply not interesting. Aside from Livia, the other two girls had nothing going on in their heads but sex and guys, which was ridiculous. Even Livia was really nothing more than an appendage of her husband, with no thoughts going on in her head that were not directly tied to him or how much she missed him. It wasn't credible and it was insulting to women. These women appeared to have no friends, no interaction with other women (not even the female slaves!), and nothing on their minds other than men, which means they failed the Bechdel test dismally!
I remain convinced that the real women who bore these names were a hell of a lot more interesting, had a lot more going on in their minds, and would have made a much more interesting story than these three fictional versions ever could, so I cannot in good faith recommend this as a worthy read unless you honestly enjoy books about shallow and unappealing women.
