<< Back to previous page

"The Last Girls of Pompeii" by Kathryn Lasky

Author:

Kathryn Lasky

Publisher:

Viking 2007

Reviewed by:

John Warren Stewig, Carthage College

As the ash and lava of the volcanic eruption in 79 AD swept away nobles and trades people, animals and buildings, so Lasky’s narrative will sweep readers along to the inevitable finish. But as wealthy Julia and her slave and confidant Sura move through the deepening, falling ash to elude the poisonous gasses, they are heading toward a revelation skillfully hinted at earlier by Lasky, a consummate storyteller.

The girls escape Julia’s family plans: for her, banishment to a temple as a servitor; for Sura, sale to Stephanus the fuller, to be his concubine. As the eruption sunders all their plans, it parts Julia from her beloved, her cousin Marcus, and Sura from her badly wounded brother, gladiator Bryzos. But the natural calamity provides in addition to freedom from controlling adults’ machinations, the vehicle to unite Julia with her previously unknown and unacknowledged aunt, who is herself a vehicle into freedom and new lives.

Lasky’s writing is richly detailed, providing information about the many holidays, competing gods and goddesses, foods, home design, transportation and ways slaves and free people related to each other. Yet these carefully researched, factual details never impede the forward thrust of the plot, as we read to discover what happens to the two girls, slave and free, neither of whom are really free until story’s end.