Mistress of Rome

I snagged a copy of this via the Library Thing Early Readers program, and after some cursory research on the internet to see what other people thought of this book, I seem to be in the minority in my dislike for it.

Written by new novelist Kate Quinn and set in 1st century Rome, the novel focuses on Thea, a fifteen-year old Jewish slave girl, owned by Lepida, who is same age and the daughter of the Colesseum's games organizer. Lepida is ridiculously beautiful and even at a young age will not stop at anything to use her physical charms to claw her way up Rome's competitive social ladder. Early on in the story, Lepida sets here eyes on Arius the Barbarian, a gladiator from Britannia, yet it is Thea who catches his heart and the two fall in love. When Lepida finds out, she abruptly sells Thea to a pimp in Brundisium to be rid of her. Lepida winds up marrying a Roman senator, much older than she is and way too boring for her (not to mention he's crippled) but the social advantages are just too good to give up.

Thea's time at the brothel is short-lived. Pregnant, she is eventually sold to a kind master who recognizes her signing talent, and Thea is reborn as Lady Athena, still a slave, but doing what she loves and in a good, safe environment.

It is in Brundisium (modern day Brindisi) that Lepida and Thea eventually meet up again, and it doesn't go well. When the emperor, Domitian, takes Thea as his mistress, Lepida goes pretty much nuts and Thea finds herself enslaved to a crueler master than she ever could have imagined.

While this story is epic by any standards, I can sum up my feelings about it in a short series of one-syllable expressions: ugh, crap, and ugh.

Like I said, I'm in the minority with this negative opinion. But let's take into account my education (which some may say is meaningless, but I beg to differ): I have creative writing degree and a minor in Greek & Roman Studies, AKA Classics, in which I focused on Roman history and society, and the Latin language.

Also let's take into account the fact that I have an uncorrected advanced reading copy of this novel, so I have no idea what the final draft looks like. But I have to say, it had better have been cleaned up before publication because this book was a mess.

My main criticism is that there were lots of point of view problems. Lepida and Thea's stories were told in their first person voices. In the case of Thea, that was fine, but when it came to Lepida, I really thought it was ridiculous that she was describing her own death as it happened. And we are not talking about something like The Lovely Bones, here; Lepida could not have told her story in first person if she hadn't lived to tell it. It was ridiculous and amateurish of the writer to have Lepida narrating her own death. Unless you are writing something like The Lovely Bones, this doesn't work. One of the pros of using first person narrative in this way is that you know the narrator survived, and if they didn't, you usually find out that somehow they have left a written first person account, like a journal, behind (ex. Sandra Gulland's Josephine B. series). Other points of view, like Arius the Barbarian's, Marcus's (Lepida's husband), and Paulinus's (Lepida's stepson with whom she has a raging affair) were all told in 3rd person, but there were several spots where this fell apart, too, with no transition between one of these characters and the next - in the same section. Having so many points of view, two 1st person and numerous 3rd, and so poorly executed, made for a really chaotic narrative structure, and the whole thing was just a mess. Any editor worth his/her weight should have been on these pretty basic issues.

My other big criticism was the characterizations. Lepida was too beautiful, too shallow, too ambitious, and too evil. You are meant to hate her, but I also expected some kind of character development with her, yet she gets none. She is the same throughout the novel. If she was such a prominent character with her own 1st person narrative, it seemed strange that she didn't merit any character development.

Similarly, Thea was too good, too smart, and too strong. You know she is Lepida's foil and you know she is a slave who is bound to be treated shitty, but of course she gets the man, the money, the great escape, and the happy ending. It was predictable.

Plot-wise, this book was barely not a trashy romance. There are also a few holes in it I won't get into here because they involve spoilers.

As for the historical detail, I found it to be mediocre, and again, I seem to be in the minority with this. In fact, the detail was so lacking, I was imagining the set to the movie Gladiator and my own travels in Italy (including Rome) the whole time because I didn't find the book's setting very well rendered at all. Author Kate Quinn's descriptions of Lepida's gowns & jewelry were nice, but overall the feel of the Roman era was missing completely. I personally did not feel like I was "there" at all, and I found that disappointing. The majesty of the Colosseum and the city of Rome were just not there. And although my Latin is extremely rusty, I could tell that Quinn was incorrect with some of her pluralizations of Latin words and gender agreements.

Will say that the end of this book was more exciting than the rest and it kept me gripped with its political intrigue and little coincidences, but other than that, this is a really disappointing book I felt I wasted a lot of time on.