Customer Reviews

A. D. 62: Pompeii

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Miranda takes part in a time travel experiment because she is the logical choice, an academic who knows Latin, Greek, and ancient history. Her objective is to go back to Pompeii, observe, and bring back information.

The first part of the experiment works: she goes back in time. However, after her escape mechanism fails to return her to the 21st century, she needs to adapt to life in ancient Pompeii, where she has been sold as a slave to a man with whom she finds herself falling in love.

The story is compelling and engrossing - a very fun read! I highly recommend it!

Miranda finds herself stranded in Pompei when her time travel experiment goes wrong and her homing beacon does not work. Suddenly, a woman from the twenty first century is stuck in the first century, and rather than being a respected scientist, she is now a slave.

Yet, Miranda is not a pessimist; she looks upon this as an opportunity to learn about the ancient world in a whole new light. Servants frequently know more about the real world than their masters, so this is a real learning experience. Using her knowledge of the future and folklore, she makes a place for hereself and even manages to find a new family, and love.

**** Fans of Diana Galbandon will find this a real treat. Miranda is a spunky, determined young lady. With well researched detail, Ms. East both educates and entertains. Hopefully, we can look for more in the near future from this talented lady.

Reviewed by Amanda Killgore.

When I saw this book, I had just finished reading two works by men on Roman Britain where they used the contemporary names for the towns, and I swore never to read another fiction book on the Romans again.

Then, I decided to give Ms. East's work a chance and I was more than pleasantly surprised. She not only has done her research exceptionally well, she also writes with a clarity and precision that is hard to match. She describes the scenes so accurately and completely in her time travel venture that I actually could visualize myself as part of the story.

The main character, Miranda, is transported back in time as part of an experiment and winds up as a household slave for a wealthy Roman family. However, unlike the character in the Tarr-Turtledove effort, "Family Gods," the young lady does not try to impose her 21st century values on the Romans. Instead, she learns to adjust and fit into their lifestyle.

I recommend this book for anyone interested in ancient Rome and Pompeii. The research is so well done that one could use it as a teaching tool.

Mary Plus 2 Cats

While the concept for the story was intriguing it fell flat in execution. Ms. East seems to have forsaken the novelists' creed "show don't tell." Perhaps the author couldn't decide if she were writing a romance novel or a history text. Dialog is almost non-existent. Most of the book is a simple recitation of events. There are quite a few instances of unwieldily repetition. A good editor might have repaired the poor proofreading and kept the story concept on track. In spite of the depth of research, this one is a candidate for the wall-banger hall of fame.

I was debating back and forth about whether to dish out that much money for a soft cover book, but finally my interest in Roman culture won out and I bought it. Well, I've finished reading this novel, and was not very impressed by the quality of the writing. The plotline is, as the other reviews have said, fairly original. Time travel is an old subgenre, but East updates it by making her heroine a Harvard graduate student: Miranda reluctantly volunteers to go travel back to Roman times and soak up the culture for research.

However, Ms. East does not go into how the time travel technology actually works. What I found particularly irritating about this novel is the amount of repetition and over-simplification built into the plot and prose. For example, around p. 3 the heroine Miranda remarks that a friend commented on her "pre-Raphaelite hair". This sentence is repeated mid-way through the book, almost word for word. Likewise, the novel goes off on these tangents in which Miranda tells a fairy-tale to her rapt Roman household members. Each time, she begins with "And this how I told it:". After a while, the number of repetitions numbed my brain and pricked my impatience. I also found the narrator's smug attitude towards the reader irritating. For example, Miranda speculates at one point that the nearest city is Neapolis--then, in brackets, she tells us that this is modern day Naples. Well, duh. It makes me wonder what kind of an audience Ms. East was writing for--adults? Or 7th graders?

Thus, I would not recommend this book. At most, buy it second-hand, or borrow it from the library.

AWFUL!! How this book "earned" a 4 1/2 star rating is a mystery unless the author has a great many friends and family who rigged the ratings. I would have rated it a "Zero" were it possible! The writing is juvenile, the writer is in dire need of a good thesaurus. Was this book written for children, or maybe by a child? The ideas and positions of the author were heaped on and repeated chapter after chapter and were all very modern and very politically correct, even from some of the A.D. 62 era characters. OK, OK, we got it: Women Good - Men Bad....Freedom Good - Slavery Bad....Democratic/Communist Society Good - Hierarchal Society Bad ...and so on. The main character (the "time traveler") constantly (every darn chapter!) told us how uncomfortable it made her to be waited on by servants and slaves. Infact she repeated many of her same attitudes, opinions and beliefs over and over again, paragraph after paragraph, chapter after chapter (see how annoying it is to see things repeated and repeated and repeated?). To summarize this book: Repetitious, redundant, inane, vacuous drivel. Can I get a refund?

If the author(an alleged "university professor") used a "pen name" to protect her identify and reputation...a smart move on her part...then why the cutesy author's photo on the back cover? Probably just "logic" consistent with the rest of the book!

Many people have sent folks back into old Rome, but Rebecca East changes it up sending her main character Miranda, back to Pompeii before its destruction. Set in a city made famous for its ruins, you can't help but be captivated by having it come to life! I will agree with some of the reviews that some better editing could have been done as some paragraphs are repetitions of paragraphers earlier said in the book, however it only minially detracts from what is otherwise a great story of historical fiction. A modern day fairy tale!

Ms. East is clearly an accomplished storyteller. She deftly weaves a complex tale of adventure and love into a piece which is both a historical guide book and a good read.

I would recommend it to the casual reader for it's strength of plot portraying a strong women in hostile world. To the student of history I would commend the detail and descriptive content used by Ms. East. She is clearly a scholar in the Roman period, yet she doesn't weigh the reader down with voluminous detail. As a lifelong student of history myself I found this piece quite useful.

This is not to say there are not some difficulties with this piece. The welding of the science fiction aspects of the piece with the core plot is clumsy and might turn the reader away in the first Chapter. A twist on the Michael Crichton's Timeline , I would not go so far as to calling it a blatant ripoff, however, the time travel theme is very difficult to reconcile with credible historical fiction.

Ms. East also has a tendency to make her protagonist nearly super-human both with regard to physical stamina and mental/emotional control. Miranda would have been more believable with more human foibles and fewer demi-God characteristics. The feminist, strong women drum holds a true and steady beat for today's storytelling, however, role models such as Boudicca have been greatly distorted by political pundits and biased historians over the centuries.

An additional point of contention comes to mind regarding Miranda's prophecies as a way of explaining her historical foreknowledge. The Cybeles were a fixture in the area of Neapolis and Cumae centuries before the setting of this piece and were still in place in the first century A.D. I find it highly unlikely that the success of predicting the earthquake would not have yielded either more notoriety or negative political attention on Miranda due to the proximity to these religious icons and the improbability that the Tullius slaves would not have leaked it to the local population. In turn, give the limited degrees of separation from Miranda to the Emperor Nero himself, it is quite likely she would have been dragged before him, willing or not.

Again, this is a story well worth reading and a lesson worth learning. For lovers of Italy and it's history, well worth the time and money, and if your planning a visit to sites at Pompeii and Herculaneum a must read.

This story is a romantic and gentle answer to the question, "what did ancient Roman families DO in the houses the tourist sees in Pompeii?" East's heroine, Miranda, a modern time-traveling tourist, is her means to envision what it was like.

I suspect this is East's romantic wish-fulfillment--a modern lady as a chaste observer of Roman family life, administration, slavery, and cuisine--and pleasantly enjoyable as such. This is not Alternative Herstory, and the author's actual interest in time-travel, paradoxes, or subversive consequences is zip. Instead, this is the charming tale of a young modern woman adapting herself to a surprise life as an ancient Roman house slave in Pompeii. Necessarily, there are a great number of happy coincidences to get her started after she falls into the Roman sea, but the story becomes a satisfying tale as she lucks into a household that is tolerant of her daily ignorance and gaffes. Her advancement is facilitated by her conveniently extensive knowledge of Latin, Roman history, and world faery tales, and by her unexpected ability to play Mozart on a flute. The story builds through a series of tribulations and trials to a frighteningly personal decision faced by all women.

Is iUniverse a vanity press? East's prose is rather simple, sometimes childlike, and occasionally repetitive, but effective enough. She digresses into ancient Roman rules at various points and has Miranda recount numerous famous fables (the Sheherazade ploy). A companion web site illustrates the places, faces, and items described in this book.

For a fuller and grittier view of almost exactly the same story line--an emancipated Californian dropped into a provincial ancient Roman town--see Tarr and Turtledove's impressive HOUSEHOLD GODS. Harris' POMPEII is about an engineer's experience of the famous earthquake of AD 79, while East's story includes tremors, of diverse sorts, that preceded it in a young lady's life.

Miranda is a modern woman sent back to Pompeii in the years before it is destroyed by earthquake and the famous volcanic eruption. Within the first 2 pages she is in the past and there are very few references to her life in modern times throughout the rest of the book. Poor fishermen pull her out of the sea and sell her to a slave market for money. Although Miranda is naïve about the myriad potential sufferings of a slave, the possession of a device intended to transport her back into the future at the press of a button gives her the courage to submit to slavery and remain in the past, thus satisfying her curiosity about ancient Pompeii. Miranda luckily winds up in the home of a wealthy couple and their 2 children. She eventually raises her status by telling stories and playing wonderful music. She befriends Tullia, the 13-year-old daughter of the house and after some months, she becomes her attendant. She also becomes the mistress to the head of the household, Marcus Tullius, and they fall in love.

If you are seeking a time-travel romance with depth, excitement and adventure that you can get lost in for hours, this is not the book that you are looking for. I read it in a few short hours. If it weren't for the few loves scenes, I would think it was intended for a much younger audience because the writing style is so like a child's fairytale. This is not a bad thing. It is just not what I had expected when I started the book. The plot is thin and predictable, but told in such a simple way with bits of information about life in Pompeii and several enchanting tales told by Miranda that the result is a very quick enjoyable read. There is no depth or passion to the romance. There is not much in the way of time travel having a dramatic effect on plot (aside from one satisfying prediction of an earthquake). The book suffers from some repetition and typographical errors and a far too neat conclusion.

But it has a happy ending and I still enjoyed it.