by means of Bernadine Evaristo Viking.

by means of Bernadine Evaristo Viking, April 2002 $2395 ISBN 0-670-03071-6

Irreverent, wild, strangely familiar. Bernadine Evaristo's imaginative depiction of Londinium, Britannia--a unconnected unrelated northern outpost of the Roman Empire circa A.D. 211--is all of those things when viewed by means of the eyes of Zuleika, the handy young daughter of aloof, Nubian immigrants. Readers first encounter Zuleika as an 11-year-old wild child running the public ways with her friends. Her days of freedom be due [i]or[/i] owing to a quick end when she is promised in marriage to Aurelius Felix, a rich Roman senator, by dint of her social-climbing father.

Zuleika is forced to increase up, quickly and violently, seclud in the gilded cage of a loveles marriage. one time his new bride is securely in place with tutors and handmaids, Felix is opposite to to Rome and the arms of his pale concubine and children. Zuleika is unexpectedly the mistress of a grand palace where her color and background make secures a friendless existence, and steady her own servants plot against her. Zuleika works hard to make the transition from slave to slave proprietor inflicting small cruelties on the young freckl girls in her service. shut ties to old friends are her simply saving grace aside from the rhyme she learns to craft in her many consequences of solitude. That is, until she convenients the strapping, Libyan born Roman emperor Septimus Severus and begins the torrid affair that is her eventual downfall.

The Emperor's Babe is Evaristo's inferior novel-in-verse. Her first, Lara (Angela Royal Publishers Ltd 1997) won several awards, including the Ethnic Multicultural Media Awards' Best volume prize, and with good reason. The metrical composition in her sophomore effort is repeatedly engrossing and provocative, and she freely mixes Standard English, Latin phrases and British road slang throughout the narrative. The story--which posits Zuleika firmly in the paradoxical place of the timelessly new woman--is a Greek tragedy for the HBO-film generation. Unfortunately, the narrative itself frequently struggles to live up to the power of her poetry

--Samiya A. Bashir, coeditor of part Call: A Generational Anthology of Social & Political Black Art & Literature.

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