Household Gods
   Judith Tarr & Harry Turtledove
  1999 A Tom Doherty Associates Book NY USA
   ISBN: 0312864876


Nicole is a thoroughly modern professional woman complete with a deadbeat ex; kids with a defunct day care center & a pass-over for partnership in her law firm. She's out of control & wishing for a better life when she goes to sleep one night to awaken in another time, in another body & somewhere place.

Judith Tarr & Harry Turtledove have created an absorbing, hilarious, wise, sardonic & lusty immersion into an earlier time in our collective history.

The continual dialog Nicole has with herself I enjoyed. It must be a lawyer-thing, this thinking on one's feet, for when Nicole awakens to strange noises, smells & itches this internal dialog & her external exploration create a fine farce.

Nicole stumbles to the window in an unknown room in which she finds herself to watch a man dressed oddly, walk along the road below, hailing her. It is when she responds that she realizes what came out of her mouth was a very old language.

This is how Nicole fumbles through her first day in Carnuntum, a frontier town of the Roman Empire circa 170 A.D. Reeling from the odor of humanity in all its aromatics, from the feeling of being out of her depths with a familiar merchant & all the everyday functions that make her skin crawl & itch.

All her cherished ideals about how much better the past must have been than her smog-laden, sexist, driven 20th century life get trodden under foot in the mud & feces of the road outside the tavern she runs. Her long-held self-righteousness about her father's alcoholism gets a rude comeuppance when she insists on avoiding the wine she sells & drinks the water.

Nicole/Umma also wakes up to the reality of being a widow with a love interest in the clothes dyer across the way; of having two children with distinctly politically-incorrect views of life, liberty & child rearing. The battles she wages with her 20th century liberalism & what is expected of her in this new world are hysterical, so to speak.

And then there is Julia: the rock upon which Nicole has washed-up. It is Julia who knows how everything works, what it costs & what it's called. It is Julia who turns her on to the Baths & to the life of the town. Julia is, however, a slave & has distinct opinions as to how mistresses & slaves behave.

Owning a slave is about the hardest lesson Nicole has to learn & her efforts to obtain Julia's manumission prove fascinating, especially as in the beginning, Julia is a tad reluctant.

As if to let her see how easy she's had it in the 20th century, Nicole must face all the common ills of that time: killing hygiene; killing childbirth; killing fevers; killing plagues &; killing invasions. She also has to learn to be head of her household in a society not so very different from her own.

It is, however, in her efforts to get redress for the horrible wrong meted out upon her by one of the Emperor's legionaires that Nicole's two worlds fuse into one.

Household Gods is a masterpiece. Well thought out, with a good saturation of modern Los Angeles life & a resonating transformation into another time & place. I loved the connection with the two gods - a delicious fragment of Aladdin-like mischief.

There are some glaring omissions I'll leave unsaid. Perhaps because I didn't want the book to end I thought the ending was sappy, speedy & convenient. I was glad to note, however, the lessons Nicole learnt traveled with her so that when she was back in her own time she lit into her life with gusto, appreciation & a distinct change in point of view.

I did enjoy Household Gods; it was replete with scrumptious details, insights & explanations, all nicely connected.
(02/13/00)

Rebecca