Melissa AddeyBesprekingen

Delightful, giving us a window on how a team of people led by Marcus and his helpers Althea and Fausta make sure everything will run smoothly for the Flavian Amphitheater [i.e., Colosseum] to be a success in the Inaugural gladiatorial games. We've never thought about it [and probably the spectators never did, either] that there were many details that had to be gotten just right for the "show to go on." We also read of Pompeii and its destruction, in which Marcus loses his family, and more bad luck--a fire breaks out in Rome and there is an outbreak of [probably] malaria. Very readable and well written. Pacing just glided along. I understand there will be sequels, which I want to read.

Some interesting ideas on how to improve a commute

In A String of Silver Beads, we met Zaynab as the dangerous and powerful rival of Kella, Yusuf bin Tashfin's first wife. In None Such As She, we see Zaynab from her own point of view, starting as a child, just ten years old, when her own father takes a second wife. Child Zaynab is easy to like. She loves her parents. She's a rebellious child, happy to run and play with the street children when she can. She's bright and lively. She's fond of her servant Miryam, and wary of her mother's servant, Hela, who is a mistress of herbal medicine, and seemingly a scholar as only a man should be.

When Zaynab grows to an age where she's eligible for marriage, she's not comfortable with the way she is frankly assessed for her assets as a potential wife and bearer of children, as well as her father's wealth and connections are a successful rug merchant. Yet there is not avoiding it. In time, one of the men who comes to her father's dinner table is Yusuf bin Ali, a lord but not an amir, who speaks to her, she says, like a person. It's the start of her career.

She's made a mistake. Not a terrible one; Yusuf bin Ali is a good man. It's just too bad that she doesn't find out till too late that he has a first wife, who has already given him five sons. He loves that first wife, and is merely fond of Zaynab.

Her worst mistake is something she does in an attempt to secure Yusuf's interest in her.

By the time she meets Yusuf bin Tashfin, she is married to her third husband,who also has a first wife whom he loves. And that mistake she made all those years ago, with her first husband, is continuing to bear fruit, both good and bad. She wants a husband who loves her. She has a brilliant strategic mind. Yet with all her marriages, she has never been first in her husband's eyes.

And she has a brilliant strategic mind, but a damaged, unhappy heart.

This is the story of a complicated woman, who has every reason to think herself not a villain, and every reason for Kella and others around her to think she is a villain. It's compelling and fascinating.

Recommended.

I received a free electronic galley from the author via Booksprout, and am reviewing it voluntarily.

Interesting

I received a copy of this ebook through Amazon free monthly pick. This was a short but interesting read. Good story.

We start in the 1070s, with a woman explaining to us something of Tuareg ways, the importance of women's jewelry and what it reveals about a woman's life.

Kella is a young woman of the Tuareg, and in 1067, at the age of seventeen, she is still passing as her father's youngest son, traveling with him and her five brothers, plying her considerable skills as a trader--and winning camel races.

It's that last that trips her up. Among the Tuareg, it's men and boys, not women and girls, who go veiled. Under a man's robes, and with her face veiled, she can pass as a boy. But when, near the end of a race, her veil becomes tangled and accidentally pulled off, she is exposed as female. It's a huge embarrassment not just to the men she beat in the race, but to her father. He had already been growing uncomfortable with letting her pass for a boy; this is the last straw. She will be returned to their home camp to, finally, learn women's skills from his sister, her Aunt Tezemt.

That's why, when the Commander of a great army and his cousin and chief general visit looking for recruits for a great plan of conquest of North Africa, Kella is in women's clothes and demonstrating her now considerable feminine skills.

But she still longs for the freedom of a trader's life.

What happens from here is both unexpected and, in its own way, logical.

Kella's life unfolds with pieces of jewelry marking each transition and new stage in life. She's intelligent, resourceful, but not so ruthless as some around her. This is an important period in Muslim history and the history of North Africa, with implications, in later books in the series, for the future of Spain, as well. The author has kept to the history that we do know, but there are large areas left undocumented, leaving plenty of room for this story.
The two men who attract her interest are each in their own way both attractive and mostly good, yet not without flaws. The same is true of Kella herself, her family, and her friends.

It's an interesting story about a period of history that isn't familiar to most Americans, and to me at least, is more interesting because of that. Recommended.

I received a free electronic galley from the publisher, and am reviewing it voluntarily.

This is a historical fiction novella prequel with a touch of magic and fantasy. Set in Morocco in the 1020's to 1050's, it is basically a teaser to get the reader interested in buying the next book in the series, as it ends in a cliff-hanger.

The novella follows the life of Hela, an herbalist (who also happens to be an empath) who is given a magical red cup by a doomed old slave woman. This cup has the ability to make whatever herbal concoction that is put in it work like... well, like magic, to heal or to harm whoever drinks from it. Is this cup a blessing... or a curse?

I did not like the magic in the book. I did not like the raunchy scenes. And I did not like the cliff-hanger ending. But I did like the glimpse into history that rarely is shared in books, the use of real places and people, the detail and texture with which the author writes, and the true uses of different herbal remedies that the author scattered throughout. You could tell that the author has talent. This book was well-written, but it simply wasn't for me. Two stars.