Household Gods - Softcover

Nicole Gunther-Perrin is a single mother of two. Today her daycare provider's quitting. At the office, her male colleague has made partner and she hasn't. The kids get sick, the microwave dies, and her ex goes on vacation with his girlfriend. Staring at a votive plaque of Liber and Libera, Roman household gods, Nicole falls asleep wishing she lived in the past, surely a better and easier time. She awakens in second-century Carnuntum, a town near the Roman Empire's borders. Death, disease, and dirt are commonplace. Slavery and corporal punishment are facts of life, and war, pillage, and rape are constant threats. Mere survival is hard work. Though Nicole adapts and even enjoys some of her experience, she longs to return to her own time. The problems she left behind no longer seem unconquerable.

Tarr and Turtledove know their history and bring the reader into a past as vividly real as Nicole's Los Angeles. They create genuine, sympathetic characters whose thoughts and feelings are true to their era and deliver a satisfying conclusion. Household Gods should be on the shelf next to L. Sprague de Camp's Lest Darkness Fall and John Maddox Roberts's SPQR mysteries. --Nona Vero

"Turtledove and Tarr make a fine team, and they bring a past era--with all its terrors, joys, humanity, and brutality--to remarkable life." --Michael F. Flynn

"Judith Tarr and Harry Turtledove both have a storytelling instinct, and, in this happy instance, it seems to have multiplied rather than just added." --Gordon R. Dickson

"A witty tour de force of nineties sensibilities meeting ancient Rome." --David Drake

"Turtledove and Tarr both know that the past is a different country and they do things differently there. We come to care both about the fallible, far from omniscient but tough and determined protagonist, and the Romans among whom she lives, who are a brilliant combination of the alien and the familiar. This is a page-turner that makes you think, long after the last page is turned." --S.M. Stirling