Forget the traveling pants

Normally, I’m all anxious on Labor day because school starts the next day. But we already have a week under our belts and all is well. (Knock on wood!)

Since it is Labor day, let me tell you about two books I read ( in a series) about a teenage girl in an unusual job: gladiatrix.

Forget the traveling pants, this is the sisterhood of the traveling weapons.  Set in the period when Julius Caesar has returned to Rome and  allowed to hold triumphal gladiatorial games. Cleopatra makes an appearance in both books. So does Vercingetorix. There is just enough detail in the fight scenes to make things vivid, bit not so much that I got bored or grossed out.

I hadn’t realized that there really had been female gladiators in Ancient Rome. The book alters history to make it seem like it was more prevalent than it was, but it is a work of fiction after all.

Publisher’s Summary for The Valiant

Princess. Captive. Gladiator. Always a Warrior. 

Fallon is the daughter of a proud Celtic king and the younger sister of the legendary fighter Sorcha. When Fallon was just a child, Sorcha was killed by the armies of Julius Caesar.

On the eve of her seventeenth birthday, Fallon is excited to follow in her sister’s footsteps and earn her place in her father’s war band. She never gets the chance.

Fallon is captured and sold to an elite training school for female gladiators—owned by none other than Julius Caesar himself. In a cruel twist of fate, the man who destroyed Fallon’s family might be her only hope of survival.

Now, Fallon must overcome vicious rivalries, deadly fights in and out of the arena, and perhaps the most dangerous threat of all: her irresistible feelings for Cai, a young Roman soldier and her sworn enemy.

 

Publisher’s Summary for The Defiant

The darling of the Roman Empire is in for the fight of her life in this lush sequel to the acclaimed historical fantasy The Valiant.Be brave, gladiatrix… And be wary. Once you win Caesar’s love, you’ll earn his enemies’ hate.

Fallon was warned.

Now she is about to pay the price for winning the love of the Roman people as Caesar’s victorious gladiatrix.

In this highly anticipated sequel to THE VALIANT, Fallon and her warrior sisters find themselves thrust into a vicious conflict with a rival gladiator academy, one that will threaten not only Fallon’s heart – and her love for Roman soldier Cai – but the very heart of the ancient Roman Empire.

When dark treachery and vicious power struggles threaten her hard-won freedom, the only thing that might help the girl known as Victrix save herself and her sisters is a tribe of long-forgotten mythic Amazon warriors.

The only trouble is, they might just kill her themselves first.

I picked up a copy of The Valiant   at ALA, hoping it was a YA book with a positive female heroine I could put in my 6th grade classroom library. Although there is a hint of romance, I have no problem adding it to the classroom collection.

The third book in the series, The Triumphant, isn’t due out until February , so I will have to be patient. It is set at the time of Caesar’s assassination – and that bodes ill for Fallon and her friends.