City on Fire by Tracy L. Higley

A Jewish girl named Ariella is the victim of the sacking of Jerusalem.  She is sold into the slave trade in Rome, but she escapes by taking the place of a gladiator.  She trains with the troupe, hoping always to gain her freedom truly and return to the home that she lost.

Cato is a struggling winemaker who moved to the city of Pompeii to escape his political career.  He feels like he can make a new start in a new city, until he comes face to face with the city’s highest and most influential politician: Gnaeus Ngidius Maius.  He gets pulled into a political struggle in order to thwart the man’s plans to ensnare the city in his already encompassing lies.

I am not going to lie: I was extremely disappointed in this book.  I strongly disliked it, but I have reasons for saying so.  To start off, I thought it was very poorly written.  Tracy Higley has been a writer I enjoyed in the past, but now I can not say so.  After reading three of her other books, I have come to the conclusion that she either does not realize that her ideas are very similar or that she enjoys writing the same story over and over again.  This book follows virtually the same plotline as the other three did.  I won’t go into this, but essentially I was very disappointed to find that only names and settings had changed.

As a writer, I have noticed that I tend to be a little more on the critical side of other people’s writing, so here is the beef I have to pick with this book: the characters are too one-dimensional.  I feel like they all suffer from monomania, the unreasonable pursuit of one idea or goal.  I was able to see right through them, and even though I didn’t actually finish the book, I think I have a pretty good idea of exactly how the book was going to end.  The protagonists were too goody two-shoes and they didn’t have enough character flaw.  The antagonist was unrealistically focused on only one thing, and it was a silly thing at that.  As I pictured the book in my mind, I found a rather cheesy attempt at a story rather than the dramatic history that the author intended.  I am aware that I am being extremely jaded because I just came off of reading Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, which has phenomenal character development and excellent writing style.

I would recommend the book nonetheless to anyone who doesn’t mind airplane books that have the same plot and characters.  I know that the book ends up happy in the end, with good overcoming evil and the bad guy being defeated, and I know there are people who are into those kinds of books.  As for me, I prefer something with a little deeper of a message and a plot that delves past the topsoil layer of literature.

I was provided with a free copy of this book from BookSneeze.com in exchange for my review.