Mistress of Rome

Mistress of Rome
By Kate Quinn

Thea, a captive from Judaea, is a clever and determined survivor hiding behind a slave’s docile mask. Purchased as a toy for the spoiled heiress Lepida Pollia, Thea evades her mistress’s spite and hones a secret passion for music. But when Thea wins the love of Rome’s newest and most savage gladiator and dares to dream of a better life, the jealous Lepida tears the lovers apart and casts Thea out.

Rome offers many ways for the resourceful to survive, and Thea remakes herself as a singer for the Eternal ’City’s glittering aristocrats. As she struggles for success and independence, her nightingale voice attracts a dangerous new admirer: the Emperor himself. But the passions of an all-powerful man come with a heavy price, and Thea finds herself fighting for both her soul and her destiny.

Many have tried to destroy the Emperor: a vengeful gladiator, an upright senator, a tormented soldier, a Vestal Virgin. But in the end, the life of Rome’s most powerful man lies in the hands of one woman: the Emperor’s mistress.

Ah, Mistress of Rome: A Series of Unfortunate Events.  It sounds weird coming from someone who just read The Feast of the Goat, but long stretches of Mistress of Rome feel like torture porn. Or tragedy porn or whatever the name is for it when the characters go through one miserable obstacle only to find themselves in front of another, higher, one. Over and over and over.

Part of that comes from two of the worst villains to grace the pages of historical fiction : Lepida Pollida, spoiled senator's daughter who is sex and power mad, and who kicks off her career by separating our lovers and selling Thea to a dockhouse brothel and then later upping the ante by seducing her husband's son and being mean to her epileptic daughter, and Domitian, the emperor, who is introduced as a potential rescuer of Thea only to turn out to be a torturer and abuser of women and slaves, including his own niece, Julia. Domitian, obviously, was a real person, and I sure hope he was as bad as all that because otherwise Quinn has sadly maligned his character here.

Quinn's writing, is, as usual, exemplary, breathless and urgent as she takes us back thousands of years to the Roman Empire. Having just read her most recently based, Briar Club, you can tell that Quinn revels in the historical details available from whatever period she's writing in. Here, being so much more in the distant past, she's not able to bring as much of that in, but there's still a wealth of ground to cover, as the book takes us from 82 ad to 96 ad.

The early sections skip great chunks of years at a time, and those are some of the harder ones to get through- our heroes just keep getting kicked when they're down, and much of the activity is just place setting for the final confrontations that take place in 95-96. By the time our heroes emerge triumphant over the villains, I was mostly just tired and wanted it over with.

Quinn's talent shines when you consider that the whole book hinges on the relationship of a couple who have a few months together fourteen years before most of the action takes place - and the couple is separated most of that time.  We have to both believe in the relationship and care about it, and Quinn manages to do that, for me at least, although Vix, the erstwhile scamp born to Thea, mostly bugs instead of endears. He becomes a primary character later in the series, which doesn't tempt me to read them.

There's a supernatural thread running through the book as well: a soothsayer who is eerily accurate, some characters who escape certain death because of the implied favor of the gods, the mysterious healing powers of gladiator blood. It lets us suspend disbelief on some of the more unlikely plot points Quinn inserts (a gladiator who only loses ONCE in eight years?? somehow everyone keeps winding up at the same places together??).

It's odd to me, that although this and The Feast of the Goat both concern fictionalized re-tellings of famously assassinated dictators (and include invented women characters who were abused by them) they feel very different. Quinn's books are comfortable reads because although some characters do get sacrificed (I won't forget you, Hercules!) she tends to leave readers on a optimistic note: Domitian's death ushered - in real life - almost ninety years of Roman prosperity.  Our core couple, reunited at last, retires to the country. Marcus, the poor beleaguered husband, gets a new wife who likes him. Whereas in The Feast of the Goat, the assassination brings not relief but torture. Thirty years on, citizens have forgotten the horrors of the regime, and reminisce for better days. Quinn doesn't trade in that kind of punchline. But the cynic in me sometimes wishes she would.

06: A Book That Fills Your Favorite Prompt From The 2015 PS Reading Challenge [13: Set In Another Country]

The Briar Club

The Briar Club

By Kate Quinn

Washington, DC, 1950. Everyone keeps to themselves at Briarwood House, a down-at-the-heels all-female boardinghouse in the heart of the nation’s capital where secrets hide behind white picket fences. But when the lovely, mysterious widow Grace March moves into the attic room, she draws her oddball collection of neighbors into unlikely friendship: poised English beauty Fliss, whose facade of perfect wife and mother covers gaping inner wounds; policeman’s daughter Nora, who finds herself entangled with a shadowy gangster; frustrated baseball star Beatrice, whose career has come to an end along with the women’s baseball league of WWII; and poisonous, gung-ho Arlene, who has thrown herself into McCarthy’s Red Scare.

Grace’s weekly attic-room dinner parties and window-brewed sun tea become a healing balm on all their lives, but she hides a terrible secret of her own. When a shocking act of violence tears the house apart, the Briar Club women must decide once and for all: who is the true enemy in their midst?

I've had this on my hold list for probably seven or eight months at least, patiently waiting my turn. At this point, Kate Quinn is now one of those authors of whom each new release will be guaranteed a spot on my reading agenda.  Although the blurb didn't exactly grab me - a far cry from her books on WWII spies, codebreakers, and other assorted heroines - it still ended up carrying her trademark: secrets, women, and yes, ultimately, spies.  

It's also stuffed full with a panoply of 50s historical references and side plots. There's almost too much going on, between the birth control pill, gangsters, segregation, the Korean War, modern art, the All American Women's Baseball League, gay rights, and the ever looming spectre of McCarthyism. Not to mention the recipes, for everything from swedish meatballs to honey cake. Quinn does post a lengthy author's note at the end describing some of the real stories behind her fictional ones. The breadth of the historical detail is astonishing at times - there's a scene involving a real dessert called Candle Salad that makes you wonder how Quinn managed to find such an offbeat but perfectly apropos recipe. The only one I wasn't at least a little familiar with was the invasion of Texas, Operation Longhorn, which is both so insane that it's hard to believe it's just a historical footnote now as well as perfectly believable given how nuts everyone else was.

The book is a little bit chunkier than her others: the framing structure involves a murder (or, at least, a dead body) and the police investigation of a Washington D.C. boarding house full of women. Most of it though, is lengthy chapters chronologically preceding and leading up to the murder, each focusing on the key characters and tenants of the house in turn: Pete, the landlord's son, Nora, the secretary and gangster's moll, Bea, the baseball player, Fliss, the English nurse drowning in motherhood, Reka, the former artist who narrowly escaped Germany only to find the American Dream not all it was promised, Claire, the gay pinup girl, and Grace, whose entrance starts the book, and who flits in and out of the others lives in a cross between a fairy godmother and puppet master.

There's certainly some things which, if you're familiar enough with the period (or, ahem, some relevant popular entertainment about the period) come as not-very-surprising surprises and the book itself feels much slower paced than her others, which is to be expected since it takes place over four and a half years. I assume Quinn kept the timeline that way for both historical accuracy as well as to give the relationships time to feel genuine growth, but it does make some things feel like they're being artificially set back, in order to have all the players at the table for the denouement (i.e. Nora reuniting with her boyfriend and Sid's planned escape both get delayed YEARS so they're all at the fatal dinner, plot wise). Those issues aside though, the book doesn't feel very slow, since each chapter concerns a mini crisis of sorts for its respective narrator. It would almost fit the series of interconnected stories prompt. I couldn't not use The Briar Club here though - the blurb literally mentions the unlikely friendships!

It also managed to make me feel somewhat optimistic about how things have trended in the US lately: if we can manage to get through all the shit the 50s pulled, perhaps there's hope for us as well. Overall, it was an enjoyable, if not necessarily demanding, read. I will continue to put my reading trust in Quinn. In fact, I have my eye on one of her older books to fill another prompt.

 

28: A Book That Features An Unlikely Friendship

The Alice Network

The Alice Network

By Kate Quinn

It's 1947. In the chaotic aftermath of World War II, American college girl Charlie St. Clair is pregnant, unmarried, and on the verge of being thrown out of her very proper family. She's also nursing a desperate hope that her beloved cousin Rose, who disappeared in Nazi-occupied France during the war, might still be alive. So when Charlie's parents banish her to Europe to have her "little problem" taken care of, Charlie breaks free and heads to London, determined to find out what happened to the cousin she loves like a sister.

It's 1915. A year into the Great War, Eve Gardiner burns to join the fight against the Germans and unexpectedly gets her chance when she's recruited to work as a spy. Sent into enemy-occupied France, she's trained by the mesmerizing Lili, the "Queen of Spies", who manages a vast network of secret agents right under the enemy's nose.

Thirty years later, haunted by the betrayal that ultimately tore apart the Alice Network, Eve spends her days drunk and secluded in her crumbling London house. Until a young American barges in uttering a name Eve hasn't heard in decades and launches them both on a mission to find the truth...no matter where it leads. 

 I was not expecting this to be so...visceral. I just finished reading Our Woman in Moscow, another one set slightly post-WWII, about lady spies, and that was basically a travelogue compared to The Alice Network. I also wasn't expecting the torture and murder and whatnot even from her earlier book, The Rose Code, which is also a fairly distant view of the wartime.  Not so here.  We know very early on that Eve's had all the bones in both her hands broken, but it's still a shock when you read it.  There's graphic depictions of, well, rape, although the participants might balk at calling it that. We're into a more grown-up version of Code Name: Verity.  We actually spend no time at all on WWII, just switching back and forth between Eve's time as a spy in WWI and Charlie's search in 1947 for her cousin.  And this is by far the weakest part of the book.  

Let me get this out (deep breath): somehow Charlie has an all encompassing need to find her cousin, whom she hasn't seen in six years, nor talked to in three years, and the report on missing persons winds up on Eve's desk. But in an unholy mess of coincidences, it's known that Rose worked at La Lethe, but somehow Eve never sees this, but yet not known that Rose lived in the village which was destroyed by German troops in revenge for suspected espionage.  AND all of this was caused by La Lethe's owner, Rene, whom is responsible for both Eve's hands and Rose's death. How convenient that Eve was the one working on Rose's report! How convenient that Eve never saw Rose's employer! How convenient that someone else knew Rose's employer! How convenient that this other person had all this information on Rose except her home address, which would have told them exactly what happened to her! How convenient that Charlie decides to go digging this all up and finds Eve at her home! How convenient that the one person Eve is willing to kill is the same person they're tracking for Charlie! 

 And I liked Charlie to begin with, but I found her less and less appealing as a character as things went on. She's like, oh well, who knows who the father of this child is, since I slept with like, seven different boys, and I'm nineteen, but I think I can raise this kid! After all, I've shown excellent judgment and discernment!  I'm just going to plan to open a cafe with my cousin, whom has disappeared!  And when all that fails, I'll just marry the guy who I met two months ago who has PTSD. Not to mention that anyone who disappeared in France in 1944 and has not turned up within a few years is DEFINITELY DEAD.  Charlie, you're an idiot.

Eve's story was very compelling though.  We spend a lot of time on her sexual relationship with Rene, which was super gross and I tried to skip past it as much as possible.  I wished we'd spent more time with Lili and the other one, but regardless, those sections do a good job of ramping up tension, fear, and keeping the book moving along.  Anytime we get back into 1947 though, we lose steam again.  They move around geographically quite a bit in 1947, but it's mostly just making time until they get to Limoges and find out what happened to Oradour-sur-Glane.

Meanwhile, we're approaching the climax of Eve's story, which (as you could have expected) results in her broken fingers plus prison, and then we take another left turn to menace present-day Rene, who, it appears, was smart enough to get through all of WWI by pandering to the Germans, could apparently sniff out lies better than the secret police, and managed to escape with his life despite the Germans losing the war, and then... despite the fact that he'd been keeping a spy under his nose and had to change his name to avoid revenge for his collaboration with the enemy, he decided to do it again in WWII, using the exact same restaurant name? Truly, a dizzying intellect.  I was NOT prepared for the shoot-out, although the idea that Eve then decides to go around hunting former nazis is enticing. 

29: A Different Book by an Author You Read in 2021 (The Rose Code)

Ten Second Reviews

Romancing the Duke

By Tessa Dare

As the daughter of a famed author, Isolde Ophelia Goodnight grew up on tales of brave knights and fair maidens. She never doubted romance would be in her future, too. The storybooks offered endless possibilities.

And as she grew older, Izzy crossed them off. One by one by one.

• Ugly duckling turned swan?
• Abducted by handsome highwayman?
• Rescued from drudgery by charming prince?

No, no, and . . . Heh.

Now Izzy's given up yearning for romance. She'll settle for a roof over her head. What fairy tales are left over for an impoverished twenty-six year-old woman who's never even been kissed?

This one.

 

This one grew on me, as I don't really like "zany" romances, and this one started out that way, with a bedraggled destitute lady camping out at an abandoned castle with a blind duke with some type of wolf -dog mix and a ferret.  Oh, yes, very likely (don't you know that realism is required in all romance novels?).  I was getting close to DNFing, but since I'd actually used up a legitimate hold for it, I figured I should at least finish, and it got better as it went on.  Companions showed up, things settled down some, though the tone was still very much "Disney-fied historical romance", but by the end of it, I wasn't mad.  Was it really my jam? Absolutely not, I will not be re-reading it.  But it did feel "mostly harmless".   Basically, a bunch of kooky people find each other, decide that friendship is more important than proving sanity, catch a lucky break because one of the sanity-hearing officers likes some books the woman's father published, and they all live happily ever after. 

 

 

 

The Further Observations of Lady Whistledown

By Suzanne Enoch, Karen Hawkins, Mia Ryan, and Julia Quinn

 

Lady Whistledown Tells All!

When the scandalous actions of his beautiful fiancée are recorded in Lady Whistledown's column, a concerned groom-to-be rushes back to London to win his lady's heart once and forever, in Suzanne Enoch's enchanting romantic gem.

Karen Hawkins captivates with an enduring story of a handsome rogue whose lifelong friendship — and his heart — are tested when the lovely lady in question sets her cap for someone else.

A dazzling and delightful tale by Mia Ryan has a young woman cast out of her home by an insufferable yet charming marquis — who intends to take possession not only of the house ... but its former occupant as well!

Society is abuzz when the Season's most promising debutante is jilted by her intended — only to be swept away by the deceitful rogue's dashing older brother — in New York Times bestseller Julia Quinn's witty, charming, and heartfelt tale.

 

Did I check this out because Bridgerton is all the rage, and The Viscount Who Loved Me is totally unavailable at the library? Yes, there are 14 people for each of the 21 copies my library has, meaning that if I checked it out, I could expect it in mmm, perhaps seven months, and even that is a workaround, because they aren't stocking the second book solo, it's only available in a set of the first three in the series.  I like Bridgerton okay, certainly not as much as some people (and not as much as my mother, who appears to be using it as a method of mood-stabilizers during COVID) but the second's plotline was the only one that appealed to me to read.  Anyway, so this was a distant second choice!

Although all the stories are interlinked (and take place at the same activities, set in London from about January 26th to February 15th, 1814, serendipitously), with the different authors, there's some definite changes in quality from story to story.  For example, Quinn's is obviously the best (due to both her authorly experience and it being her characters, so I would have assumed it), then Enoch, Hawkins, and finally Ryan is a -very- distant fourth.  I think I skipped most of that one, it was so scattershot and nonsensical.  Some of them would have been more satisfying as stand-alone novels - I think Quinn's in particular could have withstood longer treatment, and Hawkins had a great premise, but the character seemed to realize they loved each other in a very all-of-a-sudden! way that felt rushed and necessary for Moving the Story Along reasons than a natural pace.  And although it felt clever at first, by the fourth time we've revisited the same two "group" scenes from various characters' perspectives - one at the theater and one with several characters falling over in a snowbank while ice-skating, it mostly felt tedious.  Overall, not a terrible waste of an afternoon, but not really all that exciting either.  

What I really need is a good author who is NOT ON HOLD FOR SEVEN MONTHS.  Unfortunately, I found like, two that I like consistently, and I read all theirs and now it's even harder to get books because of the Bridgerton phenomenon, so I'm reduced to trawling recommendation lists and reading the zany ones or my second choices. God forbid I actually have to buy my romance novels as opposed to getting them free a the library or second hand at a used booksale behind my mother's back and then smuggled home illicitly.