My review of Elodie Harper’s novel, The House with the Golden Door, is now up at Shiny New Books!
The House with the Golden Door returns to the world of Elodie Harper’s acclaimed novel, The Wolf Den, set in first century CE Pompeii. If you haven’t read the first in the series, this review may contain spoilers, so be advised.
Amara is a former prostitute who has managed to escape the town brothel, aka The Wolf Den, and carve out what at first seems a better life for herself, as concubine to a rich young Roman citizen who appreciates her respectable background as a Greek doctor’s daughter. But she finds it hard to separate herself completely from her former brothel friends and their brutal master, Felix; she feels obliged to try to free at least some of them, and thereby becomes entangled with and endebted to him once more. Life with her new “patron” also proves less idyllic than she had expected, as she finds that he, too, has a violent streak and that she has only traded one form of captivity for another. A new love that must remain a dangerous secret impells her toward even more difficult choices, and in the end to taking another journey into the unknown… Read the full review at Shiny New Books
Oh, how interesting! This isn’t a time period I’ve read much about, in fiction or non-fiction!
Read this series, and you will learn a lot … and probably want to visit Pompeii.