Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I had high hopes for this book. I've recently finished Colleen McCullough's Roman series and I was hungry for more. When I heard of a book that fills in the years between the battle of Actium and Robert Graves' "I Claudius", I eagerly snapped it up. Unfortunately, this author has no business trying to enter the company of Graves and McCullough. Many other reviewers here have already pointed out a number of inaccuracies in this book, as well as the superficiality of its characters. But that's simply bad writing. If that was the only problem, I wouldn't have bothered writing this review. But there's another problem with this book that I must speak up about. The author draws Selene as if she's a teenager from Boston, who's never known anything but liberal politics. A modern American kid, who dozed off during history class the day they talked about Rome --100% clue-free about the ancient world. Selene is shocked-I-tell-you-shocked! at how Rome treats its lower classes. Oh please. Selene is the daughter of a Pharaoh, who essentially owned all of Egypt. So did all Egyptian slaves have health insurance and pension plans? She lived in the household of a head of state who went to war against Rome and her father was a Roman. How could she be so laughably ignorant about it when she arrives? The historical Selene would have known *precisely* how severe the punishments would be for slaves attempting to assasinate a ruler, in Rome or out of it. Instead we get a time-travelling American teenager who thinks it's completely unfair to take away her iPod, let alone execute slaves. Oh the shock, the horror! Enough. I can't read another page of this drivel. Done now.