For today's #HistFicThursdays blog, I am so excited to be welcoming Fiona Forsyth to the blog with a guest post about her new book Death and The Poet , as part of her Coffee Pot Book Club tour. Her fabulous guest post discusses the book's setting, moving away from the perception of Ancient Rome to its reality with just enough artistic license to keep readers deeply engaged with the story. But first, let's meet the book... Blurb 14 AD. When Dokimos the vegetable seller is found bludgeoned to death in the Black Sea town of Tomis, it’s the most exciting thing to have happened in the region for years. Now reluctantly settled into life in exile, the disgraced Roman poet Ovid helps his friend Avitius to investigate the crime, with the evidence pointing straight at a cuckolded neighbour. But Ovid is also on edge, waiting for the most momentous death of all. Augustus, the first Emperor of Rome, is nearing his end, and the future of the whole Roman wor...
This is a fascinating book, blending history and fantasy in a way which makes each seem somehow more believable. Marie Powell uses historical figures and settings to give an expert voice to her work and makes the reader believe that they could be reading an exciting history of Welsh culture rather than simply a work of fiction.
Powell’s descriptive writing is beautiful and evocative, although sometimes I feel a Young Adult audience may have preferred a slightly different descriptive to dialogue ratio.
Overall, a clever mix of fantasy and history to shed new light on a dark period of British history.
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