A review by nick_harwitt
Romanitas by Sophia McDougall
4.0
This is the first fiction I have read in aaaaages. I liked it because there was much chasing around and adventures, and no hard-to-follow political intrigue as I had thought at first.
The Roman feel was subtle enough, as the world mostly looks like the one we have today: for example, most real world inventions seem to exist in the fictive world as well, sometimes with latinised names (such as telephone becoming longdictor). While I felt at first that the effect was too subtle, I ended up really appreciating the fact that it didn't feel like reading a story set around 50BC (or 703 AUC) but with people having guns and telephones. The part of the Roman feel that wasn't subtle, being the point of the plot I suppose, was that slavery is still a banal and common thing in the novel.
Finally I liked that the text wasn't structured as "odd chapters for character X, even chapters for character Y" (I'm not sure how to describe it), a format tends to tire me a bit. And I liked that, despite being Part 1 in a trilogy, the novel didn't end up in a bunch of gripping cliffhangers, as most of everything was solved.
The Roman feel was subtle enough, as the world mostly looks like the one we have today: for example, most real world inventions seem to exist in the fictive world as well, sometimes with latinised names (such as telephone becoming longdictor). While I felt at first that the effect was too subtle, I ended up really appreciating the fact that it didn't feel like reading a story set around 50BC (or 703 AUC) but with people having guns and telephones. The part of the Roman feel that wasn't subtle, being the point of the plot I suppose, was that slavery is still a banal and common thing in the novel.
Finally I liked that the text wasn't structured as "odd chapters for character X, even chapters for character Y" (I'm not sure how to describe it), a format tends to tire me a bit. And I liked that, despite being Part 1 in a trilogy, the novel didn't end up in a bunch of gripping cliffhangers, as most of everything was solved.