stephbg | The Priestess and the Slave by Jenny Blackford

The Priestess and the Slave by Jenny Blackford was launched at Swancon 2009 with a flourish by Dave Luckett channelling Jack Dann, a quiet word from Trudi Canavan, some rather nice-looking homemade baklava, and an alcohol-fuelled atmosphere.

I'll cut at this point as is my habit, but the usual I'm-too-lazy-to-write-a-proper-review disclaimers cause me more pain than usual, for this little book deserves a proper review.

I was attracted to this novella by the magic word "plague" and an unfamiliar historical setting, being ancient Greece. Jenny joined me on the Culture versus Culture panel at Swancon whereupon I learned a thing or two. But I digress.

Unlike my usual fare, The Priestess and the Slave was not a story looking for a setting, but a setting looking for a story. To quote the back cover:

The Archaology Series: The Priestess and the Slave is the first in a Hadley Rille Books series of archaologically-accurate short novels about the daily lives of ancient people living and coping with read historical crises."

Just the thing for a fan of Time Team and Meet the Ancestors, and on that level it was *extremely* interesting. I could hear the scrape of the trowel while envisioning the amphora and brooches in their shiny new glory. Tick.

The work tells two quite different stories separated in time by six decades of history. From the perspective of an ill-educated slob (guilty), this hardly seemed to matter. Whilst the political backdrop is crucial to the events of the priestess, the largely domestic tale of the slave didn't really need the historical context to make it an interesting story. Given that the historical context was why it was written, students of history will no doubt extract much more from this than did I.

I always have trouble remembering who was at war with whom and when. They just keep doing it again and again.

That said, I found the domestic history in the household and temple routines *fascinating*. I found the characters a bit remote, but under the constraints of the format (or perhaps the author's inexperience in fiction) there wasn't much room for personality development. As a reader this was manageable given the short format and limited opportunities for the characters to demonstrate emotional depth. There were hints which auger well for future efforts.

I didn't see much point in the book's format of alternating between the two stories. When I read this again (and I will) I'll skip through and read each one as a self-contained short story. I know that in theory*--and in the absence of a narrative reason to do so--telling the stories in parallel adds drama by challenging the reader's memory and processing capacity, but that's all it did for me.

While it's academic petticoats were visible for all to see, and every page was packed to the brim with verifiable evidence, JB managed to make this a very readable little book, and that's no mean feat.

Apologies to Jenny for my stubborn misconception that it was a work of typically historically-careless fiction where the twist lay in the fact that the priestess nursed the slave through the plague *facepalm*. Hung on my own literary agenda was I. Does me good to have my brains re-arranged once in a while :-)

I conclude with thanks for my personal message from the author, which amused me greatly:

To Stephanie,
With dark thoughts of plague (and best wishes).
Jenny Blackford

(*) OK it's my theory, but it's still a theory.