Review - The Capricorn Bracelet

[wilderthan]

I loved Rosemary Sutcliff's historical fiction, when I was younger. I read two copies of The Eagle of the Ninth to pieces. This book is also about Roman Britain, although it's more focused on the area around the wall, and is also less about big epic deeds, and more about ordinary people -- focusing on a single family through a period of a couple of hundred years. There's less excitement, I suppose, but there are fascinating little details about how Sutcliff imagines life to have been then -- realistic, so far as I can tell.

I liked it. It wasn't the kind of story to blow someone away, I think, but one to sit with quietly and absorb. There are lovely details in it, lovely moments, and small quick glimpses of lives...

My only argument with it is that the narrators, the six different narrators, don't sound very different. It's hard, I suppose, to differentiate, but it felt like one voice. Could be partly choice, keeping the family link clear, but it bugged me.