THE FOREVER GIRL - 2024

YOUR 2024 SUMMER READ! - THE FOREVER GIRL, By Mike Bonner - Grey Whale Press. This romantic, unsparing, and authentic novel of the destruction of the ancient cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum is a modern take on such works as Bulwer-Lytton's THE LAST DAYS OF POMPEII. Young Kara is taken into captivity after Roman legionaries and their allies overrun her Rhine River village. Within the space of a few months, she goes from cherished daughter of loving Germanic parents to an orphaned and exploited Roman slave. At the age of eight, she is cast adrift in a culture that has little regard for human life-especially a slave's life. But Kara has one asset: Her mane of golden blond hair keeps her alive because of its value in producing the wigs favored by fashionable Roman ladies. Kara is purchased by Agrippina, the wife of powerful Senator Titus Clodius Eprius Marcellus, for precisely this purpose. As she grows older, Kara is charged with attending her wealthy Roman family's prized grandson and heir, Justus. Because Kara loves the babe, she is filled with pleasure in this charge. This wins her the love of Marcus, the child's father, but also the hatred of Agrippina, who schemes to consign Kara to a brothel. On the day the fateful eruption occurs, it is the infant Justus Kara risks her life to protect. Along with the story of Kara, the novel follows the life of a Roman soldier who participated in the destruction of her tribe. There is also Anicius, a slave who confronts his master when he is denied the freedom that was promised him, setting off a chain of tragedies; the gifted young writer Tacitus, who struggles to make a difference, in the literature and politics of his age; the tormented former slave Aurelius, who tries to come to terms with a shameful past; the drunken fortune teller Paccia; the ambitious magistrate, Lepidus Salvus; the visionary Senator Marcellus, his privileged wife Agrippina, and their spoiled daughter, Amelia. Towering over all is immortal Vesuvius, serenely unconcerned with the frantic, haunted lives of the human beings at her base. From Mike Bonner: "My original notes for this historical novel date to the late summer of 1995, when I watched a TV documentary featuring Dr. Sara C. Bisel, "The Bone Lady," who used advanced forensic techniques to study a collection of first century human remains found at Herculaneum in the 1980s. I was entranced by what Dr. Bisel uncovered, and resolved to write a novel about it. But instead of a patently false potboiler containing swords and shields, I thought I would devote my talents to describing ancient life as it most ACTUALLY was, something I have rarely come across in the media of our shallow modern culture. For in fact, as alien it seems now, the Roman Empire was the prototype for Western civilization we have, twenty centuries later. You wouldn't know it from the distracting influences we are currently accustomed to, but war is terrible and horrifying, reality can be unbearably grim, and it seems a standard condition that powerful human beings should automatically exploit and abuse the weak. It's as true now as it was when Rome ruled a quarter of the Earth's population. Many of the characters herein are based on my own experience, especially from my teenage life in 1960s Portland, Oregon. USA. The bones Dr. Bisel recovered from Herculaneum reveal sad truths about our common origins. Intended for new adults, this a view, based on science, about what our ancestors were like.