The House with the Golden Door

I took my time getting around to reading this, which really says that the 1st book in the trilogy didn't leave an overwhelming impression, but I finished this book in a day, which says something about its hold on my attention. (I've been finding it difficult lately to keep my mind on a book long enough to finish it, but this one had me in a stranglehold.) The book is freakishly compelling, shocking not least because it's got very uneven pacing (90% of the action happens in the last 20% of the book) and the prose style is clear verging on bland– and sometimes jarring due to its choice to be in present tense. Still? It works, and it works much better than the first book, which also undeniably worked.

The story itself is exactly what you'd expect from the first, but also more. While I enjoyed The Wolf's Den, my major takeaway from it was how many punches it pulled. Don't get me wrong; I understand why the story chooses to never depict any SA graphically (even when it happens ‘on screen', no actions are ever descripted; it's all glossed over and implied). This book is clearly being marketed to the Madeline Miller and Classical Mythology retelling crowd, a microgenre that is YA adjacent and largely uninterested in portraying the darkest aspects of the Classical world in sharper detail. But this book has a lot more in common with Pat Barker's Silence of the Girls, tonally and thematically– it wants to talk about the degradation and misery that antiquity was built on. But, from the cover art to the book lists this series ends up on, it's slotted again and again next to books where the SA that is part and parcel for the Classical world either doesn't happen, or is so vaguely alluded to that you can miss it entirely.

Should fiction that focuses so solidly on characters who have experienced incredible abuse be written in a way that means readers never have to actually see these acts perpetuated? I can't answer that question, but it is a question this series invariably raises. Do I think the book would pack more of a punch, be more memorable, and have more of a coherent message if those acts were more solidly (if not graphically) laid out? Yes. Do I think it would have sold as well? No.

So I can't really blame the author for making the choices she does. Shakespeare gotta get paid.

I will say that this is a serious improvement over the first in terms of characterization: the first book definitely has the problem of all characters save the protagonist and the villain being rational actors, with no real agenda beyond continuing to exist; they don't have plots and plans of their own, only vaguely sketched hopes and dreams. This book does an excellent job of making it clear that everyone has an agenda, has secrets and wants and needs that are totally hidden from the narrator. It makes the book far more interesting, makes the twists feel far more earned, and recasts the previous book in a different light: in the events of The Wolf's Den, was Amara just seeing what she wanted to see?

The themes of this book are by far more unique and vivid than its predecessor by virtue of being a ‘what comes after' story. What comes after you get your heart's desire? What comes after freedom, in a society that hates the freed? Can a woman be free, or will she only be ‘no longer enslaved'? Stories like the first book often suffer from a kind of ‘beating the system' narrative. Yes, obviously, we want to see the little guy beat wealth and landed power to achieve their dreams, but if that was possible for everyone with enough gumption, society would look totally different. This book answers that question by postulating that freedom in an unfree society functions on the backs of the unfree– Amara is only able to afford freedom (in every sense of the word) by utilizing the same systems that oppressed her, by taking on the same mindset of the man who abused her. I love stories about complex trauma, not just escaping it, but the difficulties of not perpetuating it, and this story falls right into that basked. I think the depiction of Amara's abuser, the main villain of the story, is probably some of the most skillful work the book does. Felix is complex, abused, traumatized, impossible to predict, drunk on power, all-knowing, flawed, mistake-prone, dangerous, and love-starved. He is complex. Abuse and enslavement creates neither heroes nor villains, just incredibly complex people who must decide, for themselves, to be kind. But if they decide to be cruel, nothing in their backstory, however tragic, excuses that cruelty. And it is a choice. I wish this book had focused on this theme more, but I don't think it's a knock against it that it didn't; it's just one of my favorite themes ever, so I always want more.

Likewise, I think this book much more than the last sets up an interesting sequel. Yeah, the main character is once again surging toward a new life, having both lost and gained everything, but she doesn't know what we know. Pompeii is about to explode. Capping off a trilogy entirely about choice, who has choices and who has choices made for them, who is allowed to steer the direction of their own life, with an event that no one chose, is a bold move and I can't wait to see how it turns out.