A review by tri_lo_bite
Dangerous Days in the Roman Empire by Terry Deary

dark fast-paced

2.0

This book is like if someone took one of the horrible histories books- which are great for kids- took out all the pictures, added talk about sex and incest, started to use some 100 dollar words, and did nothing else. I’ve never read a book that is so confusing in regard to what age it’s meant for! 

Originally I picked it up, read the first couple pages, and decided I’d read it aloud to my preteen siblings before our upcoming trip to Italy. The humor and writing is perfect for a thirteen year old boy! And then a couple chapters in, I started to get quite uncomfortable when talking about genital mutilation, incest, child molestation and other definitely not appropriate to be read aloud things. And explaining some of the harder words became exhausting. My fault? Yeah probably. But the writing style is so young I didn’t expect that level of clarity when it came to just how debouched the Romans were. 

So all in all, this is a very mediocre history book focusing on the Roman emperors. And pretty much just the Roman emperors. It has quotes scattered throughout that area from various famous people (mostly British) throughout history that have pretty much no context to the meat of the book. The writing is immature and disrespectful. Mildly sexist, and tone deaf. It feels as though we aren’t talking about real people who were actually really tortured and killed. But I guess maybe it is Roman to get pleasure from the pain of others.