Fire and Bronze: A Novel of Carthage

I was so excited when I found this book because it offered us historical fiction fans a new place in time and in history. Carthage and Tyre have not been overly written about and I had begun to get tired of the same old Rome, Venice, England novels with the same old Cleopatra, King Henry VIII and Caesar stories being written to death. Finally a new character and place. I found the first half of the book very very engaging and exciting, I loved the character of Elisha and thought to myself this was going to be a sort of Helen of Troy woman. The writing style is not overly accomplished but for a first book the author does well enough. Perhaps with future novels he can become a bit more polished. Unfortunately I struggled with finishing show more the second half, and found I had to push myself to get to the end to see how Elisha/Dido' story ends. Half way through, after Elisha and her exhiles leave the tyranny of her brother behind in Tyre, they sail off and stop midway on their journey to a Greek Island in order to obtain provisions and hopeful future citizens to take with them to help found their new city of Carthage further west. There is way too much time spent on this section where a whole lot of not much happening is going on. Once they do leave and land in Libya to build their city, my feelings are that it got profoundly uneventful and boring, the characters become flat and lifeless, and I felt I didnt care about them. The start of this novel showed much promise for an engaging read with good characters but those ingredients just dont flow through to the end in my opinion. I do agree with two of the other reviewers that the author's usage of Phoenician language got tiresome pretty quickly, and more importantly the amount of spelling errors sprinkled throughout the book was deplorable. The author needs either a good editor or a spellchecker on his word processor. Because I found both good aspects and bad, I would certainly give the author another try if he decides to write another novel. I would have been much more generous in my praise if there had just been a little more action or drama to make the story exciting. show less