![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12I don't normally do standalone book reviews these days, but a recent read was so extraordinary, so overwhelming, and just so unbelievably good at what its author was trying to do that I found myself haunted by it even before I'd read its final page. I reread it five times in succession this week, unable to pick up anything else: that's how much it got its claw into me.
The book is Boudicca's Daughter by Elodie Harper, and this post contains spoilers.
You'd think, from the title, that it was historical fiction about Boudicca's revolt against Roman rule from the perspective of one of her two daughters (shadowy and tragic figures who barely feature in the — Roman — historical record, such that we don't even know their names), and you would be partly right, except that the build-up to, and entirety of, the revolt only covers about one quarter of the book. The remainder follows the surviving daughter — named Solina by Harper — through the revolt's failure, aftermath, and the extremely personal consequences she experiences as a result. Harper first burst onto the scene with a trilogy of books about enslaved people working in a brothel in Pompeii, so it should surprise no one to learn that she is less interested in brave heroic stands against oppression, and rather in the psychology behind how people utterly disempowered in every way possible manage to survive and navigate their dispossession, and claw out something of a life in the ruins.
The first quarter of the book focuses on Solina's struggles with the weight of parental expectation: her mother's blinding ideological clarity focused on a single outcome — to drive the Romans out, at all cost, forcing everyone around her onto a narrow path whose only acceptable choices are victory or brave, doomed last stand and death.
The remaining three quarters are about Solina learning to navigate the consequences of choosing instead to survive, even though it leads to her captivity, disempowerment, humiliation, and an existence entirely at the mercy of her Roman captors in general, and the (real historical figure) legate of Britain, Paulinus, who led the victorious army that crushed her mother's rebellion, specifically. It's an existence — first in Britain as the remnants of the rebellion and her people are crushed with brutal remorselessness, then in Rome in the following years, leading up to the events of the Year of the Four Emperors (Harper took some liberties with the chronology) — of utter precariousness, in which Solina is left with nothing but her wits, and her capacity to guess at and engage with the emotions and psychology motivating the people around her who hold her life in their hands. As she recognises at various points throughout the book, it's a life that becomes a series of frightening, painful, and often humiliating choices, in which both she as a character and Harper as an author come to recognise that survival is a kind of victory, but the path to that kind of survival is extremely psychologically traumatising. It erodes one's sense of self, but if a person is able to come out on the other, harrowing side, the result is a kind of invulnerability, because the person knows they are able to survive anything.
The final three-quarters of the book is also possibly the most brilliantly crafted enemies-to-lovers stories I have ever read, although I feel to describe it as such reduces it to a kind of tropeyness that isn't really accurate.
I'm on repeated record of criticising most books marketed as 'enemies-to-lovers' as being full of disappointingly pulled punches (the 'enemies' end up being academic rivals or rivals for slots on an elite sports team or similar, or they're Romeo-and-Juliet-esque innocents swept up in a cycle of violence in a story whose moral is 'cycles of violence bad,' or one 'side' of the conflict obviously aligns with twenty-first-century morality and the person on the other 'side' immediately remorsefully recognises the errors of their ways due to the power of true love). The sharp edges are softened off to make the characters' eventual relationship easier to accept and understand by readers.
'Make them real enemies, you cowards!' is my eternal stance on the matter.
Well, you can't get more enmity than 'captive survivor of the leadership of a failed anti-colonial rebellion' and 'leader of the imperial military charged with brutally crushing said rebellion [to the point that even other Romans thought he'd gone too far],' and I think it's fair to warn everyone for whom an enemies-to-lovers story involving two such figures (especially given their respective genders, the extreme power imbalance, etc, etc) is going to be such a turnoff that it will overwhelm everything else about the book.
For me personally, I love stories that dig into the nuances of this sort of thing (as long as the historical events — or allusions, if it's a secondary world fantasy/scifi type story — are sufficiently distant), and Harper does an incredible job of taking you on a journey with these two characters (just to be clear, there is no historical evidence either that one of Boudicca's daughters survived the failed revolt, nor that Paulinus ended up in a relationship with one of them! it's all authorial license) where their eventual relationship and honest feelings towards one another feel believable and in character. It's an unbelievably tricky thing to pull off: getting them to a place where there is genuine love, genuine honesty, they both understand themselves and each other completely as people ... but Solina is able to openly say that the things Paulinus did to her and her people are unforgivable. (And for Paulinus to enter the book as the kind of person he is, and end as someone who wants not Solina's love, but her forgiveness, and understand when she cannot give it, and for me as a reader to have been carried along with this character growth such that it feels real, organic, earned and deserved is again an incredible act of authorial gymnastics.)
That's partly why I reread the book so many times: to discover all the little moments where we see both characters grow towards this point. (It helps that the Roman political situation keeps leading to circumstances in which Paulinus persomally experiences all the things he inflicted on Solina — enforced captivity, humiliating survival of military defeat, having to beg for his life, 'dishonour' from the perspective of his values, etc — although Harper resists the cheap urge to make his character growth hinge on a series of sudden lightbulb moments of empathy.)
To be able to make readers believe that it is possible in the wake of absolute monstrous wrong done by one person to another to eventually feel love, and honesty, but not forgiveness — that these feelings can coexist — is an extraordinary authorial feat, and I'm genuinely in awe at Harper for being able to pull it off.
(Also, as an aside that didn't properly fit into this review, Boudicca's Daughter is one of the few works of historical fiction I've encountered whose author actually understands that people of the past actually believed in their religions. There's a great subthread running through the book exploring how people with very different polytheisms might have thought and engaged with their own and each other's religions, and I really, really enjoyed that aspect too!)
The book is Boudicca's Daughter by Elodie Harper, and this post contains spoilers.
You'd think, from the title, that it was historical fiction about Boudicca's revolt against Roman rule from the perspective of one of her two daughters (shadowy and tragic figures who barely feature in the — Roman — historical record, such that we don't even know their names), and you would be partly right, except that the build-up to, and entirety of, the revolt only covers about one quarter of the book. The remainder follows the surviving daughter — named Solina by Harper — through the revolt's failure, aftermath, and the extremely personal consequences she experiences as a result. Harper first burst onto the scene with a trilogy of books about enslaved people working in a brothel in Pompeii, so it should surprise no one to learn that she is less interested in brave heroic stands against oppression, and rather in the psychology behind how people utterly disempowered in every way possible manage to survive and navigate their dispossession, and claw out something of a life in the ruins.
The first quarter of the book focuses on Solina's struggles with the weight of parental expectation: her mother's blinding ideological clarity focused on a single outcome — to drive the Romans out, at all cost, forcing everyone around her onto a narrow path whose only acceptable choices are victory or brave, doomed last stand and death.
The remaining three quarters are about Solina learning to navigate the consequences of choosing instead to survive, even though it leads to her captivity, disempowerment, humiliation, and an existence entirely at the mercy of her Roman captors in general, and the (real historical figure) legate of Britain, Paulinus, who led the victorious army that crushed her mother's rebellion, specifically. It's an existence — first in Britain as the remnants of the rebellion and her people are crushed with brutal remorselessness, then in Rome in the following years, leading up to the events of the Year of the Four Emperors (Harper took some liberties with the chronology) — of utter precariousness, in which Solina is left with nothing but her wits, and her capacity to guess at and engage with the emotions and psychology motivating the people around her who hold her life in their hands. As she recognises at various points throughout the book, it's a life that becomes a series of frightening, painful, and often humiliating choices, in which both she as a character and Harper as an author come to recognise that survival is a kind of victory, but the path to that kind of survival is extremely psychologically traumatising. It erodes one's sense of self, but if a person is able to come out on the other, harrowing side, the result is a kind of invulnerability, because the person knows they are able to survive anything.
The final three-quarters of the book is also possibly the most brilliantly crafted enemies-to-lovers stories I have ever read, although I feel to describe it as such reduces it to a kind of tropeyness that isn't really accurate.
I'm on repeated record of criticising most books marketed as 'enemies-to-lovers' as being full of disappointingly pulled punches (the 'enemies' end up being academic rivals or rivals for slots on an elite sports team or similar, or they're Romeo-and-Juliet-esque innocents swept up in a cycle of violence in a story whose moral is 'cycles of violence bad,' or one 'side' of the conflict obviously aligns with twenty-first-century morality and the person on the other 'side' immediately remorsefully recognises the errors of their ways due to the power of true love). The sharp edges are softened off to make the characters' eventual relationship easier to accept and understand by readers.
'Make them real enemies, you cowards!' is my eternal stance on the matter.
Well, you can't get more enmity than 'captive survivor of the leadership of a failed anti-colonial rebellion' and 'leader of the imperial military charged with brutally crushing said rebellion [to the point that even other Romans thought he'd gone too far],' and I think it's fair to warn everyone for whom an enemies-to-lovers story involving two such figures (especially given their respective genders, the extreme power imbalance, etc, etc) is going to be such a turnoff that it will overwhelm everything else about the book.
For me personally, I love stories that dig into the nuances of this sort of thing (as long as the historical events — or allusions, if it's a secondary world fantasy/scifi type story — are sufficiently distant), and Harper does an incredible job of taking you on a journey with these two characters (just to be clear, there is no historical evidence either that one of Boudicca's daughters survived the failed revolt, nor that Paulinus ended up in a relationship with one of them! it's all authorial license) where their eventual relationship and honest feelings towards one another feel believable and in character. It's an unbelievably tricky thing to pull off: getting them to a place where there is genuine love, genuine honesty, they both understand themselves and each other completely as people ... but Solina is able to openly say that the things Paulinus did to her and her people are unforgivable. (And for Paulinus to enter the book as the kind of person he is, and end as someone who wants not Solina's love, but her forgiveness, and understand when she cannot give it, and for me as a reader to have been carried along with this character growth such that it feels real, organic, earned and deserved is again an incredible act of authorial gymnastics.)
That's partly why I reread the book so many times: to discover all the little moments where we see both characters grow towards this point. (It helps that the Roman political situation keeps leading to circumstances in which Paulinus persomally experiences all the things he inflicted on Solina — enforced captivity, humiliating survival of military defeat, having to beg for his life, 'dishonour' from the perspective of his values, etc — although Harper resists the cheap urge to make his character growth hinge on a series of sudden lightbulb moments of empathy.)
To be able to make readers believe that it is possible in the wake of absolute monstrous wrong done by one person to another to eventually feel love, and honesty, but not forgiveness — that these feelings can coexist — is an extraordinary authorial feat, and I'm genuinely in awe at Harper for being able to pull it off.
(Also, as an aside that didn't properly fit into this review, Boudicca's Daughter is one of the few works of historical fiction I've encountered whose author actually understands that people of the past actually believed in their religions. There's a great subthread running through the book exploring how people with very different polytheisms might have thought and engaged with their own and each other's religions, and I really, really enjoyed that aspect too!)
no subject
Date: 2025-12-12 05:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-12 06:29 pm (UTC)As I say, the enemies-to-lovers thing is absolutely fundamental and central to it, so you have to be able to just go with it as a reader, otherwise I think the experience will be extremely unpleasant and unsatisfying.
no subject
Date: 2025-12-12 10:30 pm (UTC)As long as she doesn't fall for her rapist I'm good! (LOOKING AT YOU, HEINLEIN, AND YOUR "FEMINIST" NOVEL)
no subject
Date: 2025-12-12 10:45 pm (UTC)I have never read any Heinlein, and feel as if I've dodged a lot of bullets.
no subject
Date: 2025-12-12 10:48 pm (UTC)....I used to enjoy a couple of Heinlein books but now I don't know if I'd ever really recommend him to anyone at all, unless they were interested in a History of Sci-Fi reading list thing. Most of the Giants of Golden Age SF were more giant dicks than good writers.
no subject
Date: 2025-12-12 11:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-13 03:04 pm (UTC)I feel like a broken record at this point, but do heed my warning about the enemies-to-lovers thing. It's absolutely central to the story, and if a love story between two such characters is going to repulse you, I'd hesitate to recommend the book.
no subject
Date: 2025-12-13 07:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-13 03:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-13 04:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-14 10:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-18 04:56 pm (UTC)Oooh!
Date: 2025-12-23 03:38 pm (UTC)Re: Oooh!
Date: 2025-12-24 02:51 pm (UTC)