![]() ![]() ![]() Wow first of all I think the edition I had definitely had the best cover. Linguistically joyful, vividly drawn, and a haunting story. She has two Pictish (Scottish) slavegirls, who she treats with the classic slaveowner attitude ('they're so ungrateful for wanting to be freed, don't they understand how good I am to them?') and their accents are conveyed in the kind of heavy-handed slurred phonetics that you find in Uncle Tom's Cabin/Gone with the Wind, only unmistakably Scottish. Zuleika's slavegirls are a particularly brilliant touch. The text is vivid to the point of fluorescent, mingling details of classical life with casually modern expressions and references (I especially liked this in the placenames, eg they go into the jungle at Bayswater) the cast of characters includes people of all kinds of origins, including the Libyan born emperor and our Sudanese heroine (JUST LIKE ROMAN LONDON ACTUALLY DID, THANK YOU) as well as a trans woman and the exuberance of the whole thing is startlingly well balanced with the horror of the story-an 11-year old married to a self-centred, rich slave owner in a time when only Roman men existed as human beings and everyone else was chattel, seeking happiness as she grows up and rushing headlong to calamity. ![]() A verse novel about a black Roman child bride in 3rd-century London who becomes an emperor's mistress. ![]()
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