Savage City [Paperback]

I wanted to give this book less than five stars because of the amount of time I spent screaming 'No!' at its pages. But when it comes to it, it just has to be five stars. It's simultaneously the most awful and the greatest book I have ever read. Awful because absolutely dreadful things happen to the poor characters and in their world, and it doesn't have the happy-ever-after that's always desired, leaving me with a distinctly unsatisfied feeling. The greatest for those same reasons, and because of the wonderful detail and the really engaging way Sophia McDougall writes.

A little background to my reading experience: I bought Romanitas a little over a year ago, as it had been persistantly popping up in my Amazon recommendations for quite a while. Once I adjusted to the style of writing and got my head around Romans with televisions, I fell in love with it. I quickly purchased and devoured Rome Burning before realising the final installment had not yet been released. So there was a year of anxious waiting - especially given the giant cliffhanger at the end of book 2 - and quite a bit of re-reading and recommending. As the day crept closer, I picked up Romanitas with great excitement, and began to read again. And then, May 19th arrived and Savage City dropped onto my doormat. The delight, the anticipation!

I was still halfway through re-reading Rome Burning at this point, but I thought, 'let's just read the first chapter, see what goes on...' Cue lots of screaming at the book and calling my mother.

I will not go into details about what happens, of course. Everyone must read it for themselves! What I will say is that page 15 was not my only shock, they keep coming right up until the penultimate page. And though with each new turn of events, from the one's with a world-wide impact to the personal ones, I thought 'no! How on earth can you do that to us?!', I really truly love this book. It's not the kind of book I thought it was going to be, but now looking back I can't imagine how it could have been any different. Bad things happen. People don't always end up with the person you think they should. It isn't a fairytale. And it's a story about changing the world, so there's no magic wand that can be waved to suddenly make the Roman Empire a perfect place for my final page. And I think that's what makes it such a wonderful book.

I read a lot. But there are very few books that I care about as much as these, and these three books have drawn me in almost more than any other. I've tried to resist it, because it's given me quite a number of crazy dreams and for the last week I've been interpreting everything possible through Savage City eyes! But I can't help it. The way Sophia McDougall writes and the realistic world and characters that she creates just pulls me write in, constantly tugging at my heartstrings and always playing on my mind. I cannot adequately descirbe the tingling excitement and trepidation I feel with each turn of the page, and the shivers I get even when I'm reading something for the third time. It's a perfectly created non-perfect world and the story is perfect because it isn't perfect.

Now, I need to go and find someone that I can vent to about the final twists!

PS. A final note - I do wish Makaria had had more page time. I've always liked her since book one.

Savage City is the long-awaited conclusion to the Romanitas trilogy. The first two books, Romanitas (2004) and Rome Burning (2007) established Sophia McDougall's alternate history in which the Roman Empire never fell. The tightly-focused Romanitas served as an introduction to the series' principal characters. Rome Burning broadened the scope and set in motion a conflict between vast empires.

Therefore, at the start of Savage City, all the factions and players are established. Rome Burning ended with a cliff-hanger, but, well - that's what trilogies do. The battle lines are firmly drawn, the good guys and bad guys have donned the appropriate hats, time to get down to the day-saving exercises. Ms. McDougall has four hundred-odd pages to resolve everything in the genre-standard way.

Except she doesn't.

By the end of the first chapter of Savage City, I was well outside of my comfort zone, and by the end of the second, all bets were officially off. When was the last time you were halfway through the last volume of a genre trilogy and you genuinely had no idea how it would end?

In fact, the most frustrating aspect of Savage City is that it is virtually impossible to review without spoilers. As someone that came to the book spoiler-free, I don't want to ruin that experience for anyone else. With each page, anything can happen. The good guys are in real danger. The bad guys can win. And beyond the plot, Ms. McDougall moves swiftly past other barriers as well: race, gender and sexuality are both relevant and irrelevant in exactly the right balance. Everyone counts as a person and as a well-defined character.

Sure, there's still magic and destiny and all those things that we demand from our genre reading, but it all takes a backseat to the compelling whirlwind of a story. Savage City is about a handful of bruised and battered people being swept away in the tide of (alternate) history, and the reader is carried right along with them.

It helps that Ms. McDougall still insists on keeping her characters at the heart of the story. In the first two volumes, the author proved that she's committed to driving her books through the characters rather than through world-building. As a result, both heroes and villains are all oddly-sympathetic figures. The author brings their motivations and compulsions to life in such a compelling way that it is difficult for the reader not to suffer alongside both parties. Savage City continues along this vein, further frustrating devotees of traditional science fiction. There are mysterious doomsday devices, tantalizing foreign cultures and futuristic continent-spanning battles, but none of these actually matter very much. Oh, they certainly mean something in a "this is the sort of doohickey that changes the world" kind of way, but, for the reader, we experience all of these through the eyes of the characters. And the characters? They have other, more pressing concerns (generally "survival", but occasionally "food" and, every now and then, "saving the world" or "falling in love").

It is tough to review a book without being able to provide detail, but if you're in a trusting mood, trust me on this one. Savage City may be one of the single finest works of science fiction I've ever read. This is a genre ostensibly defined by bravery and imagination, yet it is still only on the rarest of occasions that someone has the courage to break the mold entirely. This is one of those books. Seize it. Savage City is beautiful, heart-breaking, uplifting, invigorating, inescapable and ceaselessly, relentlessly, wonderfully surprising.

I enjoyed this book very much indeed but mostly for reasons I cannot divulge without giving away plot points. The final volume in the Romanitas trilogy is for the most part a deftly-written conclusion to the series. The plot engaged my interest from the start and jinked a little on its way to a tumultuous ending. There are multiple plot lines all of which are resolved, but maybe not always to please the reader and certainly not to give an empty-headed fan some cheap satisfaction. Nor do the characters act as crowd-pleasers. They have their lives to live on the page, distinct from the wishes of the reader.

I charged through at least half the book in a single, ill-advised, late-night sitting. You do want to know what happens next. You will care for the characters. I hope Sophia McDougall has more to write now and won't keep us waiting as long for her next book as we did for this one.

This is a four and a half star book. I took off half a star for some slight implausibilities in the otherwise excellent plot and Amazon won't let me give half a star, so four stars will have to suffice this time. More, please.