Ancient Rome Book News: The Wolf Den by Elodie Harper

The Wolf Den by Elodie Harper – Spoiler-Free Review

What’s it about?

From the blurb: Amara was once a beloved daughter, until her father's death plunged her family into penury. Now, she is owned by a man she despises and lives as a slave in Pompeii's infamous brothel, her only value the desire she can stir in others.

But Amara's spirit is far from broken. Sharp, resourceful and surrounded by women whose humour and dreams she shares, Amara comes to realise that everything in this city has its price. But how much will her freedom cost?

The Good and the Not so Good

We follow the lives of five prostitutes living in a brothel as well as their owner and several minor characters both inside the brothel and outside in Pompeii. Each character has her/his own personality, with their own histories and motivations and you quickly come to appreciate the distinctly different individuals. You are quickly able to put yourself in their positions and wonder how you would react, as each character deals with their situation in their own way. It’s not as simple as just looking for an escape as is often the way brothel workers are portrayed in fiction, the women look for angles, ways of manipulating the men they deal with, both their customers and their owner and ultimately how they can best live their lives with the least amount of abuse and hardship. That’s not to say they have anything other than a horrific experience, they absolutely do, but it was interesting to read how they could take some small amount of pleasure from things like socialising together, shopping trips and visits to the baths as a temporary escape from the brutality.

So this is a book that is strong on characterisation – there are plots and sub-plots involving Amara and her friends but it’s clear early on there’s not going to be an easy resolution to her hardship any time soon.

I liked how the author considered what would happen to the women as they became too old to be profitable for the owner, how their desirability was a constant worry and source of distress to them because they knew they had little future outside their usefulness as slaves. This was just part of how well the author wrote the characters as separate individuals, along with how their pre-slavery lives still impacted on their thoughts and attitudes. I’ve not seen this portrayed so well in other slavery-related stories.

I also found myself considering how the women are described, in terms of their sexuality in what is a book filled by necessity with sexual scenes. There are never any lingering physical descriptions of Amara or the other workers, in terms of their bodies, even though they spend a lot of their time naked. I wonder if this was written by a male author we would have spent more time with descriptions of how they looked undressed. In this book the nudity was very matter of fact, a necessary part of their roles and I quite admired how the author avoided gratuitous descriptions in order to portray that.

Stylistically I found the present tense the only aspect I didn’t like. It’s always a personal preference of course and I would have enjoyed it more if it had been written in the past tense. The conversations between the characters still felt natural as they are always in the present tense anyway, but then we would return to the present tense and it just felt too jarring and often brought me out of the world.

Final Thoughts

Reading any book that has the main characters having to endure relentless brutal episodes often becomes a challenge to read and remain emotionally engaged, it is difficult to remain empathetic if it is one horrible incident after another. This book succeeds in interspersing the grimness with moments of hopefulness and warmth between characters which keeps you involved. It’s a story that has stayed with me for some time after finishing the book and I’ll definitely be picking up the next two books as soon as they are out.

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