Book Reviews: June 2024

Wrapping up the first half of the year with some more Ancient Rome books and a romance novella! Here we go:

Last Act in Palmyra by Lindsey Davis:

I jumped ahead a bit in the Falco series and read book #6, because the setting sounds more interesting to me than the others. This book sees our PI – oh, excuse me, informer, Falco, and his now-girlfriend Helena Justina, traveling to Judaea and Syria with an itinerant theater troupe to root out a killer who has murdered the troupe’s playwright. As with the first Falco book, I’m a lot less interested in the mystery (the stakes are rather low) than the characters and, in this case, the setting of the story. It sometimes reads like a travelogue through Asia Minor, but I don’t mind it. 3/5

The Ides of April by Lindsey Davis:

I’m jumping ahead yet again to the next generation of the Falco books – this is the first of a new series, now taking place about 20 years later and revolving around Falco and Helena’s adopted daughter, Flavia Albia, who has taken up her father’s mantle and investigates a series of mysterious killings in Rome under Domitian’s reign. The mystery is fairly interesting (though I guess the killer’s identity quite early on, there is another twist that I didn’t expect and was pleasantly surprised by), but the pacing is very slow – the killings stop at one point and we’re left with a bunch of characters wandering around. Still, I like the characters and appreciate the exploration of a woman’s life in Ancient Rome (Albia is a widow, which allows her certain independence, but she is still more bound by social rules than Falco was). 3/5

Naked Statues, Fat Gladiators, and War Elephants by Garret Ryan:

Rounding out my selection of “everyday life in Ancient Rome” non-fiction is this fun little book with a series of trivia questions about life in Ancient Greeks and Romans (“How did they tell time?”, “How did they get a shave?”, “Did they travel for leisure?”, etc.) The information is not new, but the writing is fun and easy to read, and a nice way to wrap up my foray into antiquity. 4/5

The Chemistry of Familiar Objects by Alexandra Vasti:

I’m a little behind on my reading goal this year, so I picked up a quick novella – I’ve read one of this author’s Regency romance novellas last year (“In Which Margo Halifax Earns Her Shocking Reputation”) and quite enjoyed it, so I decided to check out another. The setup is quite similar to the Halifax book – a starchy man (a printer of children’s books in this case) and a fiery woman (a chemist) go on an impromptu journey, sparks fly, they get trapped together in an abandoned hut, it’s cold, more sparks fly, etc., etc., etc. It still reads too modern to me, just like the Halifax book, but at least the chemistry between the main couple is a bit more believable and there’s an external plot to add some substance to the romance. 3.5/5

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