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Theodora: Actress, Empress, Whore (2011)

by Stella Duffy(Favorite Author)

3.42 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

0143119877 (ISBN13: 9780143119876)

languge

English

genre

Romance

publisher

Penguin Books

series

Empress Theodora

review 1: Against my better judgement, I started this book. I don't usually read historical dramas, but this was about a real person so I thought I'd give it a shot.Against my better judgement, I kept reading after page 80 - my usual threshold to abandon a book I'm not enjoying. And I wasn't.This missed on so many marks.Yes, there were some historical accuracies, but it was wild fiction/fantasy for the most part.Yes, a fairly colourful picture is painted, but it's just not believable. Nor is some of the colourful language: EG, this is set in Constantinople in 500AD, yet there's frequent use of the epithet "bollocks," which is so clearly 13th century Anglo-Saxon.Considering she's a commoner the descriptions of commoner life were rather lacking, focusing mostly on the 'glamour' of dan... morece school and palace life and the numerous parades. City life is painted to be so ... nice, and jolly, where people get time off to watch a parade. Colourful, yes, but it is mostly rose-tinted.Where's the poverty, the grime, the wars, the sick, the injured, the struggle to scrape a meagre existence?? And we're to believe she had so little ambition? That she fell up the social ladder from whore to empress? Hardly.I wish I hadn't bothered.
review 2: The closest thing to literary fiction that I've read in the historical fiction genre in awhile, "Theodora" is a rich trip through the years preceding the Empresses' rise to joint power. Much of Duffy's prose avoids dialogue, which lends it the aura of literary fiction, rather than the screen-adaptable blow-by-blow that's usual in the genre. This relatively short novel moves us from extreme to extreme, both geographically and spiritually. I got a little bogged down by Theodora's trip to the desert, but otherwise I thought that the story moved along well. less

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