The Fire Within is a historical romance set in Pompeii right before the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Now, I don’t typically gravitate toward historical romances, but the unconventional setting won me over. I’ll also add that I was reading this for a romance book club and I was determined to finally attend a meeting since my summer travel was over.
Unfortunately, my reading experience can be boiled down to several frustrating, eye-rolling, Kindle-throwing moments while waiting for this volcano to get down to business. And you’ll have to slog through over half the book before that happens.
Aurora Fortunas is a medica in training. Her grandfather is a surgeon and her mother is a medica under her dad’s tutelage. Evander Mercurius grew up in Pompeii, but moved to Corinth in his early teens. He comes back to the city to help make connections for his family’s shipping business. Evander and Aurora knew each other as children. The main conflict, aside from the looming danger of a volcano, is that Aurora’s family doesn’t possess the right connections that Evander needs. However, another family does and of course, they’re evil and have a villainous daughter.
There was a lot that enraged me about this book. A lot. And I think a list would most effectively keep this review from turning into indecipherable keyboard smashing.
Dialogue: I know next to nothing about historical accuracy. That’s just not my wheelhouse. However, the dialogue between the characters felt so modern. Too modern. Granted, the whole book couldn’t have been written in Latin, but I expected the language to feel more formal from the syntax and sentence structure of a foreign language.
Trebby’s eyebrows shot up. “Don’t you want Rome to know who you are?” he hissed. “Would you throw away everything I am offering over a pretty piece of ass?”
Can someone give me the etymology of the phrase “piece of ass”? Judging from what I’ve found it doesn’t date back far enough.
The brother: Aurora has a younger brother named Teo. He had a twin who died. This is mentioned once as some sort of character explanation for her parents being overprotective of their remaining children.
But Teo, I hated him. So much. I think the reason why is because I don’t think he was supposed to be unlikeable. He’s the troublesome, precocious little brother. However, his actions get a lot of people into shitty situations. In fact, his decision to run back to find a puppy during Vesuvius’ eruption directly causes his father’s death.
Good job.
Nature is crazy: There are increasingly concerning signs that something is not right. The water tastes funny. Birds and crops are dying. There is an increase in earthquakes. Someone is even burned by volcanic heat rising from the seafloor.
Anytime someone, usually a woman, brings these things up as a cause for concern, it’s brushed off with some patronizing comment.
Now, I can see this being possible for the time given how things ended, but it was so frustrating to read. Perhaps that’s why I shouldn’t pick books that utilize real events.
Content warning: from here on out, the following things I hated have much to do with sex, sexism, slut-shaming, sexual assault, and pedophilia.
The hero is a cad: I never became enamored with the hero. He just wasn’t truly interesting to me, but there was one moment where I screamed aloud at my Kindle, “You fucking asshole.”
After the eruption, Evander and Aurora manage to escape via Evander’s boats. I don’t recall how soon afterward they consummate their love, but let’s remember that this volcano consumed the city where Aurora had lived all her life, killed her father, and caused her endless worrying over the fate of her mother and grandfather until they could be reunited.
And this idiot. THIS FUCKING IDIOT. He has the nerve to say this during sex.
“My wife,” he whispered hoarsely, “your body has scorched me tonight, hot as the embers of Vesuvius.”
I’m sorry, but nothing would make me drier than being reminded of the single worst moment of my life.
What is wrong with you?
Madonna/Whore complex: Unfortunately, we’ve seen this before in romance. The heroine is virginal and innocent (and usually brunette), while the rival for the hero’s love is a bitchy blonde who likes to show off her body.
This is exactly the relationship between Aurora and Valentina. Valentina is frequently described as wearing revealing clothing and she enjoys running her nails down Evander’s arm, back, or any other scrap of skin she can reach. There is literally no redeeming quality to Valentina and I honestly have no patience for one-dimensional villains that are a walking example of internalized misogyny from the heroine’s viewpoint.
Even more awful is that Aurora and Valentina do almost the exact same thing in regards to “having” Evander. Toward the end, Valentina makes up a rumor that she’s pregnant with his child. She is pregnant, but the baby isn’t his, but there’s no one willing to refute her claim. Earlier in the book, Aurora was going to trap Evander’s ass by getting pregnant, so he would feel obligated to stay in Pompeii.
Both of these things are terrible.
Also, Valentina’s pregnancy plot is swiftly ended by the volcano. It was an unnecessary addition to make Valentina even more “evil.” Pass.
Sexual assault: There’s a moment where Aurora is tasked with treating gladiators’ wounds. A gladiator named Crispin is so taken with the pretty healer that he literally grabs her vagina. Aurora scolds him and then they become BFFs. I kid you not. She then calls upon him to help her out on at least two separate occasions.
I’m sorry, but I’ve never had that interaction with any of my friends.
“Remember that time when you groped me without my consent? Haha, yeah, that was great. Anyway, are we still on for brunch this Sunday?”
NO.
To me, a man who would do that to a woman doesn’t have an isolated incident. There was nothing else to say that he hasn’t done this to people before Aurora or that he wouldn’t do it to someone else.
And now for the last one.
Pedophilia: Evander is invited to the home of Trebius “Trebby” Valens (Valentina’s dad). Though they are supposed to talk business, Trebby has hired sex workers for the night. Here is the sentence that made me realize enjoying the book would be an impossibility:
He was reclining on a couch in the garden as two prostitutes pleasured him. One looked to be no older than a child.
The he in this sentence is a sleazy senator from Rome. I realize that this is probably accurate and to be honest, I’m not well-versed enough in history to know when age of consent became a thing in various societies. I also know that I’m ascribing my modern sensibilities to this scene, but there is no situation where I want to read about pedophilia and the sexual abuse of a child in my romances.
There was no purpose to this scene either. And to have this mentioned so offhandedly and casually? I can feel color coming to my cheeks and my heart rate rising just from looking up the quote again.
Everyone in this book is either terrible or annoying, except for the dogs. There was not a single moment of enjoyment. Nothing about this book is redeemable to me and the only acceptable happy ending would have been if Mount Vesuvius took all of them. You know it’s bad when you’re rooting for the volcano.
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“You know it’s bad when you’re rooting for the volcano.”
I’ll be borrowing that sentence for any upcoming fitting situation because it’s just the best.
I also applaud you for actually finishing this book! I’m afraid I wouldn’t have had the patience.
Antidote rec?
I recently listened to a fascinating podcast I loved on Pompeii archaeology:
https://wordvine.sydney.edu.au/files/59/18542/
Re your comment on dialogue: No, dialogue representing a,foreign language shouldn’t be formal–the Romans were just as slang as anyone. But the problem is that slang &-informal expressions in English (Or any language) tend to be tied to particular times and places in a way that evokes thoughts,of those times & places and therefore isn’t a suitable stand in for a historical setting. The trick is to give your dialogue an air of informality without making the reader feel like the characters just took an excursion to (say) 1980s Los Angeles and it does take a skilled writer to do that.
I think this might just be a sign that I have gone completely around the bend, but reading this I was shrieking because I studied the classics for… about a decade, and none of these names would have been in use at the time. Aurora??????????? aaaaaaaaaaaah this is not how Roman names worked!!!!!!!
I know, I know, historical accuracy is fake, and I accept this, BUT ALSO reading their names alone was enough for me to say “nope couldn’t do it” Latin had really restrictive naming, and by 79 most women didn’t even GET their own praenomen unless they had sisters, and then it was just like “Dad’s name Maxima” or “Dad’s name Major” I mean nevermind that “Valens” is like, the wrong format for a name, I am fairly sure. Most (if not all) nomens have -i stems not an -ns which is like, a weird third declension noun. It’s not important but uuuuuuuuuugh this is a bit of wrongness that can be easily corrected just by googling “Roman names”
Ugh. I took too many years of Latin I guess.
Okay, so the show Spartacus (was on Starz, all seasons are now on Netflix) is a huuuuuge guilty pleasure for me, but one of the things they actually did really well was figure out how to use modern English (slang and cuss words) but use a syntax that made it feel different. I don’t know how well their approach would work for reading vs watching on TV, but it was one of the things I enjoyed about the show.
I love a good non-regency historical but this one doesn’t sound enjoyable.
I’m disappointed that this is so bad, because I would enjoy a good Pompeii-set historical romance. A few years ago I read Robert Harris’s Pompeii, which is historical fiction with a not-very-satisfying romantic subplot. As a fictional depiction of the eruption of Vesuvius, and a summer page-turner, though, it’s pretty good.
Like TresGrumpy, I spent a lot of study years in ancient Greece and Rome (enough to earn an accidental double major in Classical/Medieval Art History) and like her I would have noped out of there on the names alone. And nobody would have used a nickname, especially for an important person or someone you were trying to impress or persuade (and even if they did it wouldn’t have been spelled that way, it would have been spelled Trebi). Names would have been structured “family name-father’s name-personal name” with a possible “epithet” added at the end to help tell family members apart who had similar names or for someone who had made a mark for themselves socially or politically. And you would always refer to someone by their family name; personal names were never used except within the family.
Anyway.
No, people would not have known that all these signs portended an eruption but they would not have brushed them off; they may not have evacuated (these things had happened before but nothing came of them and the volcano settled back down) but they would have been nervous and would all be in the temples trying to placate the gods. As for the sexual shenanigans, they are more or less historically accurate, as Romans were very big on sex as an expression of dominance (hence senators, generals and other important people forcing their underlings into homosexual intimacy whether or not either of them was in actuality homosexual), but I think the reactions of the characters should have been different? Like, it would not have been unusual for Crispin (Crispus, dammit!) to grope Aurora in an attempt to intimidate her, but (a) you don’t want to intimidate a doctor, who has sharp pointy things on hand and (b) Aurora would not have been permitted to attend a man without a bodyguard/chaperone accompanying her and (c) I don’t think she would have trusted him for anything afterward unless she needed him to intimidate someone else. (And wasn’t a medica basically just a midwife/herbalist, in any case?) And the child prostitute was most likely a slave, in which case the concept of consent would have been laughable to a Roman, but not necessarily something a modern person wants to read about, and not something that should be used as shorthand for Skeevy Maximus.
I hate the madonna-whore complex.
So much so, that i plan to satirize, viciously, in my Cinderella retelling. Can that be possible by the way? Can you vilify the madonna-whoee dichotomy?
The way i worked it out; the stepsisters are a villainous version of the trope. Stepsister 1 is a female Casanova/Don Juan who breaks mens hearts for sport, corrupts young boys, ruins marriages, sees men as another notch on her bed, and is a predatory and narcissistic libertine. Stepsister is pious and chaste, but terribly sanctimonious, judgmental, slut-shaming, holier-than-thou, and condescending. The Cinderella character is both sensual and compassionate, has an affinity for nature and animals, is cunning, self-determined and self-motivated, seeking to reclaim her family estate and lands, stolen from her by her stepfamily. Cindy also practices a form of ancestor worship, guided by the ghosts of her sister, mother, and grandmother.
Do you think it could work?
A book about Pompeii that’s worse than the Kit Harington Pompeii movie? (aka Jon Snow and the Volcano) Now there’s an accomplishment.
Oh, Amanda, you poor baby!
I’m impressed with how the posters on this site are willing to, as they say, take one for the team. They read horrible books (thank you Amanda!) and Elyse watches both The Bachelor and The Bachelorette. Thank you! everyone!
“The hero is a cad: I never became enamored with the hero. He just wasn’t truly interesting to me, but there was one moment where I screamed aloud at my Kindle, “You fucking asshole.””
ROFL but the cover model!! Ay papi.
Yo, are we not gonna even talk about the fact that the author is named Carmela Dolce??
There are things that annoy me so much in novels, they make it impossible for me to enjoy them. There’s everything you said, of course. There’s also the speech tag thing. FFS, authors, one cannot hiss a sentence, especially one with not a single sibilant in it. You cannot smile a sentence. You cannot glare a sentence. You speak it. Speech tags should be kept simple, the way something was said needs to be gleaned from context. ARGH. That’s just a pet peeve of mine.
Oh, and as someone both pedantic about historical accuracy and ancient Rome, I can pretty much tell you this book is full of sh*t from the instances you cited. The names are all wrong. “Trebby”? With a “y”? Yeah, no such thing in Latin. I would question the presence of a bitchy blonde in this, too. Blonde people, especially non-Patricians, were very, very rare in that area, during that time. So, to use a modern (and stupid) cliché for characterisation shortcut purposes is lazy, sloppy, and just plain cringe-worthy.