At the end of a truly harrowing pandemic year, The Magical Rome Universe is the only fiction-verse that I took up to explore, and boy was I glad I did!
Starting right at the beginning, you get the option to play a quiz that assorts one of the book's characters to you, with a short description of why you fit that character. This was an excellent way to reel me in because it kind of gets you personally invested in the character and leaves you wanting to know more about them and what happens to them through the story.
The cover page holds promises of magic and mystery and intrigue. The Tolkienesque maps of Rome at the beginning of the book are nostalgic, and much appreciated! I look forward to seeing more illustrations in future editions, especially of some of the magical elements and characters, because this is a book that could really come alive with those!
Now about the story. This is indeed a tale of a magnificent, dangerous, and magical Rome, exactly as the author says. Right in the first chapter, it throws you into an urgent beginning that combines all of these three elements, culminating in an intense scene that you know changed the fates of many characters. And then fast forwards to a few decades later to a point of apparent calm, where you keep reading to find out more of what happened to them. The book is an absolute page-turner, and the prime characters are rich, nuanced, and grey, each with positives and vices, which is what makes them so much more real, and interesting. I finished reading it within 3 days and not one point in the book was idle, superfluous, or unengaging. The story is well-connected, progresses at an even pace and the emergent situation in the final few chapters is built up to very well. And the ending is a winner, it ends in a cliffhanger, changes your perception about a lot of characters you thought of a certain way, leaves you yearning to discover more about greater plans at play, and at the same time it gives you an emotional semi-closure which leaves you feeling content about what you read, and allows you to wait eagerly but patiently for Book-2.
One aspect that I feel the book could have used a bit more of, is a little bit more storytelling as to how the two babies that we encounter in chapter one eventually turn into what we see them as almost 4 decades later. While the childhood of one of the protagonists is talked of in places allowing us a link, it is not so for the other and I would have liked to know snippets of his childhood as well, allowing us to know why and how he became a master-warrior and wannabe-Senator.
But that being said, this universe has more books in line and I sure look forward to discovering more there. Especially as it seems that few important characters were only teased and started off here, and they have far greater roles to play in the upcoming further story. One of them is my favourite character from the book, Calpurnia, and I can't wait to see her take centre-stage somewhere in the upcoming story, as she surely seems built for it!
I hope the denizens of Magical Rome keep prodding the author's grey cells with their antics as he calls it, so we can have that soon!
