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This is the book The Wolf Den was too scared to be. Forget The Wolf Den’s Pretty Woman bullshit, this time it’s going down for real. The late Roman Empire is here and it’s ugly af.
A very graphic (seriously, trigger warnings ⚠️), very bleak look at what it’s like to have to live in slavery, not even given the curtesy of having a real name.

Sparrow follows a slave boy of unknown age, origin, and name from early to middle-ish childhood. Writing decades later from a Britain abandoned by its Roman overlords, Sparrow (as he calls himself) recalls his experiences first as a child labourer and then as a child prostitute living among the town prostitutes or “wolves�� in modern day Cartagena on the eve of the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
Early Christianity also plays a significant role, including the uplifting insight that Christian Love (tm) was just as vicious back then as it can be today.

The writing in general was pretty powerful, but I do have some complaints. For starters, this was another book that should have been restricted to 300 pages - editors, honestly, I’m begging all of you. We spend waaaay too much time on Sparrow as a small child; it’s takes half the book before any action really takes place, even if the writing in between is nice and atmospheric.

The weakest part of the story was the character of Sparrow himself - even considering the fact that neither he nor the readers know his exact age, I could never tell how old he was supposed to be at any given point. By the time he gets sent “upstairs�� to work as a prostitute, he’s described as being at least somewhat sexually mature, so probably around 10ish, but he still thinks like a toddler, always asking dumb questions. “What’s a fugitive, what’s a graveyard��, that sort of thing. Don’t kids normally have their question phase at like 4/5? I can’t remember being this dim when I was 10��

Last but not least, the author slipped up a few times and threw in some anachronisms - “kebabs�� in Ancient Rome, really? A slave called Digitus being nicknamed “Diggy�� - people could speak English back then I guess?

Overall, I’d say this is a generous 4* - well written but depressing on all fronts. Sparrow breaks the fourth wall at one point and muses that nobody will most likely ever read his musings, which I feel like encapsulates this novel’s theme of utter hopelessness. There’s no happy endings, no answers to the open questions the narrator or we have, the characters are very complex and very dark (don’t think I’ve felt such disdain for a fictional character in a long time as I did for Focaria, Sparrow’s involuntary surrogate mum from hell). Not a light read, not an easy read, but overall I think I’m more glad than not that I read it.