Quo Vadis

How do you rate a book that you slogged through for two hundred and fifty pages, wanting to quit, hating the sappiness of the love story, cringing at the thou-thine-ye vocabulary of the characters' conversations...and then, completely unexpectedly, falling in love with the text for the last two hundred pages, flipping pages like you are reading a bestseller, fascinated with the descriptions of Nero's Rome, awestruck at the sacrifice and love the characters show for abominable people?

I settled on four stars.

The heart of the story is the love-at-first-sight romance of Vinicius, a haughty centurian, and Ligia, a captive princess, in the Rome run by the monster Nero. These are terrible times for the poor, the slaves, Christians...just about everyone except Nero and his rich friends, who say and do anything that comes into their minds, who care nothing about anyone except themselves, heedlessly blaming others for their own misdeeds, (literally) throwing people to the lions. Vinicius was one of these people, a friend of Nero, oblivious to anything except personal pleasure, and it was only after he met Ligia and her Christian friends that he began to change into a human with character and empathy and love.

Christianity is heavily salted into the story, and you may not be able to eat of the tale because of that, and I am not denying that much of this may feel as if it were written by a person trying to convert the world to a Christian philosophy. And maybe that is so. Still the juxtaposition of the Christian folks in the story next to Nero and his cronies—especially as I read while recalling of some of the worst of the last four years of leadership in America—well, it's wildly, manically refreshing.