Write Out Loud (Reviews and Writing)

“…Lawrence has succeeded in keeping my interest… I still finish the last page wanting to know more…”

This epic ploughing through of Caroline Lawrence’s children’s/young adult’s stories set in ancient Rome is nearly at an end. It has taken longer than expected because the last eighteen months have been pretty catastrophic personally leading to a twelve-month virtual hiatus from reading books at all. I’m slowly regaining my energy and love for reading.

This fifteenth book in The Roman Mysteries series has certainly rekindled much of the fire and I am grateful to the author for that. I suspect the last two books that follow this will be read fairly swiftly now. I want to know how this all ends up for the intrepid explorers and detectives. You don’t read fifteen books about the same characters without really getting invested in their futures.

Not that it looked like they were having any futures at all at the beginning of this story. I was thrown into emotional turmoil right from the start as we begin with our young friends shipwrecked and believing each other to be dead despite actually surviving. Nubia is ultimately the one completely lost and, believing her friends are gone forever, sets off to return to the only other family she had – back in Nubia, from where she was taken and sold into slavery.

Honestly, if there’s one aspect of these stories that is unbelievable, it is that the trauma they have gone through hasn’t turned them into mentally damaged shells of themselves. If their recent adventures had happened to me, I would, by now, have given up and become a beggar on the streets of Egypt until I died of starvation or was murdered in my sleep. But Flavia Gemina and her friends are made of tougher stuff than me!

Not only do they recover from losing everything in the shipwreck, but they also work out that Nubia is alive and begin an epic quest, following the route of the Nile, to find her so that, together, they can finally go home back to Ostia. And for once, we actually get something like a mystery to solve as Nubia’s companion, guiding her to Nubia for no known reason, leaves cryptic clues for Flavia to solve, along with her friends and Seth, a scribe at the Great Museum at Alexandria and rather reluctant guide who is forced to help the young Romans. Together they solve the riddles and evade both capture and death as enemies close in.

The story is, in short, a cracking yarn. There’s an element of leaving further character development alone for this story – other than continuing something of Nubia’s tragic tale – and just letting these kids be the great detectives they are. That said, there’s loose ends at the end of the book that definitely need tying up – their lives when they get home will depend upon it! – but that’s for another book. What I can tell you is that by the end of this story, the four friends remain stranded, far from home and indeed in great peril.

That means, of course, that you have to go on to read the next book. But then you’re going to do that anyway, aren’t you? At this point, as I said before, you’re invested in these characters and you want to know what happens to them at the end of the series. Well, I do anyway. Lawrence has succeeded in keeping my interest in them all. With this book, as with the very first, I still finish the last page wanting to know more and find out what happens to the characters afterwards. Luckily, I can! Onwards to Book XVI – The Prophet from Ephesus…

My verdict:

Read all the reviews for this series:

• Reflection: The Roman Mysteries by Caroline Lawrence
• The Roman Mysteries I – The Thieves of Ostia by Caroline Lawrence
• The Roman Mysteries II – The Secrets of Vesuvius by Caroline Lawrence
• The Roman Mysteries III – The Pirates of Pompeii
• The Roman Mysteries IV – The Assassins of Rome by Caroline Lawrence
• The Roman Mysteries V – The Dolphins of Laurentum by Caroline Lawrence
• The Roman Mysteries VI – The Twelve Tasks of Flavia Gemina by Caroline Lawrence
• The Roman Mysteries VII – The Enemies of Jupiter by Caroline Lawrence
• The Roman Mysteries VIII – The Gladiators from Capua by Caroline Lawrence
• The Roman Mysteries IX – The Colossus of Rhodes by Caroline Lawrence
• The Roman Mysteries X – The Fugitive from Corinth by Caroline Lawrence
• The Roman Mysteries XI – The Sirens of Surrentum by Caroline Lawrence
• The Roman Mysteries XII – The Charioteer of Delphi by Caroline Lawrence
• The Roman Mysteries XIII – The Slave-girl from Jerusalem by Caroline Lawrence

Social Entrepreneur, educationalist, bestselling author and journalist, D K Powell is the author of the bestselling collection of literary short stories “The Old Man on the Beach“. His first book, ‘Sonali’ is a photo-memoir journal of life in Bangladesh and has been highly praised by the Bangladeshi diaspora worldwide. Students learning the Bengali language have also valued the English/Bengali translations on every page. His third book is ‘Try not to Laugh’ and is a guide to memorising, revising and passing exams for students.

Both ‘The Old Man on the Beach’ and ‘Sonali’ are available on Amazon for kindle and paperback. Published by Shopno Sriti Media. The novel,’The Pukur’, was published by Histria Books in 2022.

D K Powell is available to speak at events (see his TEDx talk here) and can be contacted at dkpowell.contact@gmail.com. Alternatively, he is available for one-to-one mentoring and runs a course on the psychology of writing. Listen to his life story in interview with the BBC here.

Ken writes for a number of publications around the world. Past reviewer for Paste magazine, The Doughnut, E2D and United Airways and Lancashire Life magazine. Currently reviews for Northern Arts Review. His reviews have been read more than 7.9 million times.

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