There are male slaves as well but they don’t get much focus – Paris is the only male slave in the brothel Amara works at but he resents his position and lashes out at the women for it, so he just gets ridiculed most of the book. I get the point the author is trying to make but there’s like 400+ pages of all the men in the book being abusive rapists at worst and benevolent but ultimately condescending and out of touch at best. And there’s a lot of repetition about how men are bad, nobody cares what others talents a whore might have, to them she’s just a whore, blah blah blah.

I will say I really think this book needed another round of editing to cut down on the length a bit because honestly there are a lot of scenes that ultimately don’t mean anything, they’re just kind of there. The author clearly did a lot of research into the time period and she managed to avoid making Amara unlikeable and an unrealistic portrayal of a prostitute in those days – she manages to win the favour of some rich men but equally her outspoken nature occasionally gets her into trouble, especially with her cruel, mercurial pimp, Felix. With her friendships with her fellow workers being tested when Amara starts to climb the ladder in her determination to buy her way out of her position and maybe even regain her freedom. We follow Amara, a former doctor’s daughter who ended up sold into slavery and now works at a brothel with four other She-Wolves, the beautiful Dido, bitchy Victoria, naïve Beronice and motherly Cressa. While I enjoy historical fiction as a genre, Ancient Rome isn’t a very common time period, so I was curious about this book because I remember it being everywhere in bookshops a few years ago.

The wolf den by elodie harper