Boudicca's Daughter

LoveReading Says

Following on from her brilliant Wolf Den trilogy, Elodie Harper here presents a fabulously thrilling imagining of Boudicca's Daughter, inspired by the statue of the iconic queen on London’s Westminster Bridge, in which the Iceni leader’s daughters appear behind her. “It is their unknown story which has long fascinated me”, shares the author in her foreword to this thoroughly gripping novel.

Here Harper imagines Boudicca's eldest daughter as red-haired, tattooed Solina, a young woman who possesses her father’s “poise, the cold determination of a Druid”. A king of his people, her father has visions of blood and death, monsters and beasts, gods and goddesses, and when Solina herself receives a sign of war, he confirms, “Your mother is right, Solina. You must go where the goddess leads you.” When he’s killed, Solina’s aunt declares her to be “a warrior of the Wolf Tribe, heir to her father’s kingdom”, and it’s not long before she journeys to London, releasing her rage on “Roman homes with the ferocity of a river that has burst its banks”.

Though soon forced to put down her sword and travel to Rome as “a captive, a symbol of Rome’s victory”, being her mother’s daughter, and a formidable woman in her own right, Solina’s life in Nero’s Rome is anything but straightforward as parts of Rome burn, and “paranoia consumes the court”. In her words, “Boudicca is dead, but I have brought my mother’s vengeance to the heart of Rome”.

Richly visual, Boudicca's Daughter pulls no punches as it delivers a punch-packing portrayal of female courage and ferocity in an age of extreme brutality. At once immediate and complex, it’s a wild ride of a read — historic fiction at its most edge-of-your-seat arresting, and thought-provoking with it.

Reviewed by Joanne Owen
Joanne Owen’s lifelong love of reading and writing began when she was growing up in Pembrokeshire, and very much wished that witches (and Mrs Pepperpot) were real.
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