http://www.schlaikjer.net/reviews/050... ( )

This is a "quiet" novel, one that involves a lot of contemplation. My theory is that if your novel involves a lot of thinking/contemplation/dealing with something, then it better be about the most exciting people ever. And this one is about at least interesting people, Ovid and a witch. Somehow, it's still kind of boring. ( )

Somehow this book manages to convey a sense of Ovid's time while keeping a foot in a very modern sensibility. I wonder ... would a character like Xenia really have such autonomy? I would like to think so but I'm no scholar of the period.

The prose is lush and heady, but not so much so that you lose track of what's going on. Sometimes it's the very sensuousness that makes you feel more accurately what's going on. The portrait of ancient Rome, as seen through the eyes of both Ovid who lives and breathes and loves it, and Xenia to whom it's all alien and doomed, is brilliant.

I just have a couple of quibbles. Sometimes Alison seems too fond of her own adjectives. Maybe this is supposed to echo the style of classical epic (brave Ulysses & faithful Penelope & the wine-dark sea and all that), but I found it a flaw in otherwise compelling prose. I got really tired, for instance, of reading about Xenia's "glassy" hair in the first couple of chapters, and began to wonder, what color is her damned hair anyway? (Answer, finally gleaned from the Roman party girls' comments: it must be white-blonde.)

My other quibble is yeah, Xenia is a seer, prophetess, what-have-you, but toward the novel's climax I think she's given more knowledge of various characters' activities than I think she'd reasonably have. But again, that's just a nitpick. It's barely a ripple on the fabulous current of this tale.

Besides the beautiful, evocative, allusive writing, the thing I like best is that the author has taken what could have been a standard "literary" tale and refused to tread that biased & well-trodden ground. You have your passionate & driven man and your passionate but naive woman. In so many of these stories there's a horrible murder or betrayal and the literary twist is "she drove him to it" through the awesome power of her femaleness, yada yada. This sexist bushwa is unfortunately painfully prevalent in art throughout the centuries. How decent, how much more realistic, how much more authentic is Alison's presentation of Xenia not as The Female Other but as active, conscious actor in the story with her own ambitions, her own work, her own perceptions, and a normal human sense of self-preservation, alongside Ovid's own equally compelling inner workings.

The killer thing here is that Alison threads this normal and reasonable line through a setting of heavy sensuality, emotion & portent. In one sense this is a fantastic novel in the original sense of the word; no one's life is like this (is it?). In another sense, this is one of those rare books with a true portrait of the inner life of a woman as well as that of a man. ( )