Mistress of Rome

By: Kate Quinn
Stars: **

I generally like to finish books, unless they are unbelievably bad.  I at least finished this one, so that's gotta say something...but not much.

The story revolves around Thea, a Jewish girl who is one of the few survivors of Masada.  She's a slave to conniving and horrible Lepida Pollia and she falls in love with a gladiator, Arius.  Jealous of their relationship, Lepida sells Thea into prostitution.  Several years later, Thea is Athena, a promising musician who crosses paths with Emperor Domitian and quickly becomes his 'pet'.  There are several historical figures involved (Emperor Domitian, his niece Julia Flavia and Flavia Domitilla-one of the more interesting characters), though most of them are fictional. The book covers about 20 years of these people's lives.

I have two major rants about this book:

My first rant would be the constant shifting from first person to third person.  The two main female characters were read in first person, everyone else was in third person.  This would have worked if each chapter were from a different POV, but each chapter switched continually between the two perspectives.  It was jarring and sometimes you didn't know which character you were reading about.

My second rant is about the antagonist, Lepida Pollia.  She was a horrible character-evil, manipulative, and cruel...for no apparent reason.  When they first introduced her through her perspective, I kept expecting to hear about something in her past that made her the way she is, to connect with the character in some way.  But she was so one dimension that it was off putting.  She was placed there just to make the main character's life a living hell.  I stopped caring about her early on.

Other than that, the book was just mediocre.  I read it on the Kindle version, and often the paragraphs ran together, making is difficult to know who was speaking.  Some of the language is more modern than I would have liked, and Thea's choice of cutting herself because she feels survivors guilt was questionable.

So for all that, I had to give the book 2 stars.