REVIEW: Finding Minerva
Apr. 6th, 2008 04:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feather_ghyllFinding Minerva: Frances Thomas. Pont, 2007.
I love 'alternate universe' stories. Does anyone remember Sliders, where the main characters moved from alternate Earth to alternate Earth? Here be dragons, hippies, mutants or tyrants...I've just been reading Black Powder War by Naomi Novik, part of the 'Temeraire' series about the Napoleonic wars in a world where dragons exist. I love stories that are set in a world that asks what if history had branched off at some critical point, leading to a similar but different world to ours.
The premise of this young adult book, to borrow an Americanism, is that the Romans never left Britain because the Roman Empire never fell and so the world developed at a different pace. Although it is set more or less now, maps, history and society are markedly different. Christianity is one of the many religions and cults practised in the Empire, there haven't been as many technological developments, slavery was only recently disbanded, and women and plebeians are only just raising the argument of universal suffrage. But the Empire is at the brink of change, with rumours abounding about the old Emperor's health, and here in Britain, to the west is the resurgence of the Cymric people, traditionally allowed a measure of freedom for tribute, which includes the newly important coal.
Livia Marcel is fifteen and up to now has lived a privileged life. Her father was a respected soldier, who unusually encouraged her inquiring mind, but he died a few years ago in an accident. Her mother has become vague and lost in a haze of prescribed drugs, and Livia's only brother, who is older than her, has become influenced by the powerful and secretive Mithraic cult - a sort of freemasonry at its worst among the already powerful military. The world is one of curfews and whispers of those who would impose harsher laws, who wish to restore Rome to its former glory. Livia herself is on the brink of growing up: the push comes when her best friend is accused of a murder he swears he didn't commit and her brother Tony takes this opportunity to send her from the life she's grown used to to a school linked with his cult.
Said school, Ishtar College, is something of a parody of the boarding school of fiction. It is anti-intellectual, but as organised as the Guides, filling up the girls' time, making them accomplished rather than educated, with the aim of marrying them off to the military. Or rather marrying the better-off and well-connected, and making other arrangements for the more disadvantaged girls.
But the Cymric terrorists/freedom fighters keep sending Livia messages that suggest that her father's death was not the accident she supposed and that there is a conspiracy against her family and friends. Scared, the pampered but intelligent upper-class girl goes on the run dressed as a boy and finds a world of hard work, where you must live on your wits and find what protection you can, but not trust it too much. It's a paranoid thriller, a coming-of-age story with an across-the-class-divide romantic subplot, and a fascinating imagining of an alternate society that reflects some of our world's concerns. It's not wholly convincing (but I'm the type that could have done with an appendix containing an alternate timeline for Livia's world), Constantinople's Christian Empire remains a bulwark against the Islamic bloc, but no mention is made of the Americas and Asia. The details we get are organic to the plot, that is the author's concern rather than a Tolkienesque world building.
Of course, this is a YA story, and it focuses on its heroine learning to rely on herself and her own abilities and perceptions, to question the 'givens' of the cotton wool wrapped around girls in her class. Inevitably, she's the girl with the key to unravelling a national/Empire-wide conspiracy, the girl who will help shake everyone's world as much as hers has been shaken. I definitely enjoyed it overall, and would recommend it, especially if you have an interest in alternate histories and/or Roman Britain.
I love 'alternate universe' stories. Does anyone remember Sliders, where the main characters moved from alternate Earth to alternate Earth? Here be dragons, hippies, mutants or tyrants...I've just been reading Black Powder War by Naomi Novik, part of the 'Temeraire' series about the Napoleonic wars in a world where dragons exist. I love stories that are set in a world that asks what if history had branched off at some critical point, leading to a similar but different world to ours.
The premise of this young adult book, to borrow an Americanism, is that the Romans never left Britain because the Roman Empire never fell and so the world developed at a different pace. Although it is set more or less now, maps, history and society are markedly different. Christianity is one of the many religions and cults practised in the Empire, there haven't been as many technological developments, slavery was only recently disbanded, and women and plebeians are only just raising the argument of universal suffrage. But the Empire is at the brink of change, with rumours abounding about the old Emperor's health, and here in Britain, to the west is the resurgence of the Cymric people, traditionally allowed a measure of freedom for tribute, which includes the newly important coal.
Livia Marcel is fifteen and up to now has lived a privileged life. Her father was a respected soldier, who unusually encouraged her inquiring mind, but he died a few years ago in an accident. Her mother has become vague and lost in a haze of prescribed drugs, and Livia's only brother, who is older than her, has become influenced by the powerful and secretive Mithraic cult - a sort of freemasonry at its worst among the already powerful military. The world is one of curfews and whispers of those who would impose harsher laws, who wish to restore Rome to its former glory. Livia herself is on the brink of growing up: the push comes when her best friend is accused of a murder he swears he didn't commit and her brother Tony takes this opportunity to send her from the life she's grown used to to a school linked with his cult.
Said school, Ishtar College, is something of a parody of the boarding school of fiction. It is anti-intellectual, but as organised as the Guides, filling up the girls' time, making them accomplished rather than educated, with the aim of marrying them off to the military. Or rather marrying the better-off and well-connected, and making other arrangements for the more disadvantaged girls.
But the Cymric terrorists/freedom fighters keep sending Livia messages that suggest that her father's death was not the accident she supposed and that there is a conspiracy against her family and friends. Scared, the pampered but intelligent upper-class girl goes on the run dressed as a boy and finds a world of hard work, where you must live on your wits and find what protection you can, but not trust it too much. It's a paranoid thriller, a coming-of-age story with an across-the-class-divide romantic subplot, and a fascinating imagining of an alternate society that reflects some of our world's concerns. It's not wholly convincing (but I'm the type that could have done with an appendix containing an alternate timeline for Livia's world), Constantinople's Christian Empire remains a bulwark against the Islamic bloc, but no mention is made of the Americas and Asia. The details we get are organic to the plot, that is the author's concern rather than a Tolkienesque world building.
Of course, this is a YA story, and it focuses on its heroine learning to rely on herself and her own abilities and perceptions, to question the 'givens' of the cotton wool wrapped around girls in her class. Inevitably, she's the girl with the key to unravelling a national/Empire-wide conspiracy, the girl who will help shake everyone's world as much as hers has been shaken. I definitely enjoyed it overall, and would recommend it, especially if you have an interest in alternate histories and/or Roman Britain.
