I love this author.

Normally, I love this woman’s books, and one of her series is on my final list of books I’d make other people read. Her descriptive narrative is wonderful, and gives you a real sense of time, place and setting. Her characterizations are simple yet engaging.

It only stands to reason that anything she writes badly would be just as good, but in reverse. In this book, the descriptive narrative is painful, setting the story then taking you along a terrible, sorrowful, tragedy-laden road. The characterizations are fraught with doomed spirit, and even before you realize this story ends very, very badly, you definitely get a sense of every character’s ultimate futility.

This is not a badly written book. It’s well-written, well-researched and well-described. But I hated this book for its pointless (to my mind) depressing storytelling, the interesting but unlikeable characters, and the horrid fate of the people of ancient Britain at the brutal hands of the Roman Empire.

Maybe I’m too sensitive; maybe I miss this author’s usual lightness of love for her normal stories about the peoples of Ancient Egypt. But it hurt me to finish this book, and I hope someone else will have more success liking it than I did. Because I really tried.