Household Gods
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
Nicole Gunther-Perrin is a modern young professional, proud of her legal skills but weary of childcare, of senior law partners who put the moves on her, and of her deadbeat ex-husband. Following a ghastly day of dealing with all three, she falls into bed asleep - and awakens the next morning to find herself in a different life, that of a widowed tavernkeeper in the Roman frontier town of Carnuntum around 170 A.D.
Delighted at first to be away from corrupt, sexist modern America, she quickly begins to realise that her new world is as complicated as her old one. Violence, dirt, and pain are everywhere - and yet many of the people she comes to know are as happy as those she knew in twentieth-century Los Angeles. Slavery is a commonplace, gladiators kill for sport, and drunkenness is taken for granted - but everyday people somehow manage to face life with humour and good will.
No quitter, Nicole manages to adapt to her new life despite endless worry about the fate of her children "back" in the twentieth century. Then plague sweeps through Carnuntum, followed by brutal war. Amid pain and loss on a level she had never imagined, Nicole finds reserves of strength she had never known.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historical fantasists Tarr and Turtledove rework The Wizard of Oz in this absorbing new collaboration. Nicole Gunther-Perrin, their L.A. '90s version of Dorothy, is a 30-ish attorney trapped in a single mom's nightmare. Her well-to-do, deadbeat ex-husband is frolicking with a bosomy blonde. Her baby-sitter abruptly decides to move back to Mexico. A younger--male!--colleague gets the partnership she's been thirsting after. The kids throw up in the car. The microwave gives up the ghost... and Nicole, praying for a simpler life, collapses. She wakes up in the body of a widowed tavernkeeper in 2nd-century Carnuntum, a Danube-side outpost of the Roman Empire. Life is simpler--but even more miserable: battling filth, lice, lead poisoning, dysentery, plague, starvation and barbarians, Nicole learns that the mangy lions in Carnuntum's arena eat real people, and she is raped by one of the armor-clattering Roman soldiers who beat back the ravaging Germans. Then Titus Calidius Severus, a reeking workman with a tender, generous heart, thaws Nicole's brittle spirit and helps her share the basic happiness that keeps the everyday Romans around her going. Nicole also abandons some of her liberal sacred cows for solid Roman common sense: a swat on the bottom, she learns, does wonders for pre-teen rebellion that futile attempts at reasoning cannot. Once Nicole whirls back to present-day Los Angeles, she's more grown-up, far better able to cope with her life because she now understands the people around her and cares about them more. Drawing on a wealth of fascinating historical material and fleshing it out with snappy dialogue, superb characterizations and a genuinely appealing heroine, Tarr and Turtledove genially prove how much fun it can be to go back to Oz--and even better, that there's no place like home.
