A Coin for the Ferryman was an interesting, fun book to read. This book was hard to put down at times.
The author did a good job of introducing the characters and giving you enough background on each one to make them interesting. The time travel part of the story was interesting and had some catches to it that definitely had a down side.
It was funny that they decided to go after Julius Caesar, to bring him forward to the current time. Caesar was quite a character when he arrived. So you learn about his life and loves.
Then once they have to go on the run with Caesar to keep him safe, the book gets really really good. Hard to put down.
I listened to the audiobook and the narrator was good.

The question posed by a scholar was, "What would Julius Caesar do?" Caesar was a genius and brilliant at the art of politics and war; based on his brilliance, an interdisciplinary team decided to set up a secret project to bring Caesar to the present via time travel.
Caesar is brought to the future, and during his short stay, he experiences quite the adventure with Cassandra, the Latin scholar on the team. He goes to Vegas, runs from individuals that want to benefit from the secret project, and learns of his fate.
A Coin for the Ferryman is a slow-paced book, at least in the first half, where readers will learn about the time travel project, and a great deal of character development is made regarding Cassandra, our lead character.
Once Julius Caesar travels to the present, the story picks up the pace significantly, which engrossed this reader. It was a curious read, and I kept reading to learn what would happen to Caesar in the present day and if his fate would remain the same.
Overall, A Coin for the Ferryman was compelling in premise, but the pacing was troublesome for me. The story was flat with Caesar's experiences; much of the story could have been dedicated to this portion of the story.
I recommend this book to readers that enjoy time travel and unevenly-paced novels.

I read this for NetGalley for an honest review.

Struggling to make ends meet in Las Vegas, with a mother who is a teacher and a gambling and always-broke stepfather, Cassandra loves Latin and the classics and only wants to go to college to study more. But, her earnings as a waiter aren't going to cover her desired education. Encouraged by her friend, Cassandra finally agrees to be an 'escort'. Her first client turns out to be a lonely millionaire missing his deceased wife and daughter. Alexander Hunt and Cassandra learn they have a shared passion for the Latin language and antiquities. As a result, Alex offers to pay Cassandra's way through college, no strings attached.

In California, Cassandra finds a lovely landlord and accepts a part time job as a Latin translator with a Nobel winning scientist. The job requires that she sign all kinds of nondisclosure agreements. The scientist, Andrew Danicek, has built a machine he thinks can transport people through time. But, they need to know exactly where someone was at a specific time. Because the death of Julius Caesar was so well documented, Danicek's team decides to bring Caesar to the year 1999, with Cassandra as translator. The plot becomes more involved, with an attempt to kidnap Caesar, Danicek's backstory, as well as Caesar's skepticism at the whole story. He could only be returned at a specific time, four days later, and the race is on to get him back to Rome in time to be assassinated.

Cassandra needs help to return Caesar to the facility so he can be sent back to Rome, and she works with Alexander Hunt to get Caesar back in time.

Mark Ashby has recorded over 500 books and been nominated for awards for his work.

This book is recommended for readers who enjoy science fiction, action, and for those who like stories about ancient Rome.

As a former Latin scholar, I was deeply intrigued by the concept of this book - Julius Caesar and time travel? Why not? And, that was the mindset I kept for most of the book. It's a bit of a wild ride and one for fans of speculative fiction.

Many thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for sharing this one with me. All thoughts are my own.

I am someone who studied history in college- with an emphasis on greek history and this book just was so beautiful. I am someone that usually reads romance or fantasy... or honestly complete smut. Then I decide I need to use my brain and give it a break and boy was this a beautiful one. I think from start to finish this was such a genius book and I enjoyed it immensely. I definitely plan on reading more by this author.

A Nobel Laureate, Andrew, brings together a diverse team to create a time machine to transport Julius Caesar to the present. The science behind the time machine is completely glossed over. Caesar is chosen because they need to transport someone that the exact place and moment of death is known. The reason they do not choose MLK or JFK or Abraham Lincoln is also completely glossed over. For their own inexplicable reasons, the team chooses Caesar, who speaks a dead language. So they recruit a beautiful young classics student, Cassandra, on a full scholarship after meeting a kindly billionaire on her first job as a high price call girl. THEY DID NOT HAVE SEX THEY HAD DINNER.

On the team there is a brilliant medical doctor, Faith, who is unfortunately a miserable bitch because she had sex AND dinner with Andrew, the head of the team and just could not get over his judge-y rejection.

The rich woman who funds the project , Sonia, is barely tolerated. She is a former-secretary and widow of a brilliant millionaire.

The other woman on the team, Elizabeth, is married to a shady yet brilliant FAMOUS AND CHARMING NUMISMATIST trader in coins and antiquities.

Caesar is transported and must stay for 4 days for reasons that are glossed over. During these protective and carefully controlled 4 days, his only “field trip” is a NONSENSICAL AND RIDICULOUS COCKTAIL PARTY FOR JUST THE TEAM at Sonia’s house. And of course this is where things fall apart.

Not enough details that are needed for logic and believability. And way too many details in backstories of minor characters and descriptions of food.

The premise had promise and an opening scene about a misplaced coin found in an archeological dig is very intriguing but not revisited with enough oomph. Julius Caesar was very interesting, very well drawn. Every female character was annoying, weak and painted with hateful misogyny.

The premise of this book was interesting, but the focus on Caesar did not hold my attention and I felt my interest waning throughout the story. I would have preferred more of the time travel and less of the historical/mythological elements!

This is one of those books that I just stumbled across on NetGalley. I’ve heard nothing about this A Coin for the Ferryman, even though it was published in March of this year. I was intrigued by the title and the premise and requested the audiobook earlier this month, and started listening as soon as I was approved. While not a perfect book, it was a lot of fun!

The premise here is kind of wacky: time travel has been privately discovered, and a tentative plan to build a team and “borrow” Julius Caesar from the moments before his death on this Ides of March. Because of the distance from the event, they’ll be able to host and interview Caesar over the course of 4 days before returning him to the exact moment from which he was extracted. The dream team to be compiled must include: a couple of engineers to run the technology, a doctor to ensure that Caesar doesn’t croak before his historically appointed death, and a couple of classicists with whom Caesar can actually converse. Because, you know, Latin. As luck would have it, the person best at conversational Latin happens to be a young, beautiful college student named Cassandra. In hopes that her beauty will draw Caesar in and that her grasp of the language will make him more compliant, she is drafted to become the final member of the team.

I really like the story itself. However, the first half, over 250 pages of this book, is just the preparation for Caesar’s arrival. This felt like an excessive amount of build-up. The book is 540 pages, and I feel like it would have been a much stronger, tighter story if edited down to under 400 pages. It just felt unnecessarily bloated. Secondly, I feel like with a book of this length, the characters should have been more multifaceted. While I liked our main perspective character, Cassandra, she came across as almost flawless. The rest of the characters could almost seem like caricatures in various portions of the story. I didn’t find them unlikeable, per se, but they felt oddly flat for how long was spent laying out the details of each. I also found some of the interpersonal relationships unbelievable. Chemistry that was implied between various members of the cast felt a bit forced and unlikely.

But again, the story itself was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed the concept, and the appearance of Julius Caesar really spiced everything up. He was definitely the star of the show, along with Cassandra. There were some truly funny moments, and quite a few madcap scenes that kept me on the edge of my seat. Even if there were a few things I didn’t love about the execution, I found the idea so wonderfully original that I would absolutely recommend it to others.

Wow! I am almost lost for words to describe how bad this book was - well, actually, had I the interest or inclination, I could pick it apart sentence by sentence, but our time on this planet is limited, so I'll keep it short.
Do NOT pick this book if you have any interest in history, decent plotlines or character development. DO pick it if you want descriptions of the clothing and inane conversation of vacuous people in Las Vegas.
In short, we have a group of academics who invent a time machine and decide to bring Julius Caesar back to the present for four days. An attempted kidnapping (very brief, both in execution and foiling) by Russian Mafia affiliates is added because... I guess having Julius Caesar there in person wasn't enough to hold the interest of the projected readership of this book.
Furthermore, absolutely nothing happens for more than the first half of the book, except for a couple of completely unnecessary back-flashes that have zero bearing on the plot. And, despite the fact that the author is a woman, the #MeToo movement would have a field day with the fact that one of first members of the academic team, who is hired, then promptly bedded by her boss, is then - when he dumps her, for being both a human being AND a better academic than him - spends the rest of the book treated as if the whole affair were her fault and her behaviour childish.
But, of course, this should prepare the reader for the fact that our heroine is hired basically to be "professional welcomer" to Caesar; I won't go into the many, many logical faults in her story, but I don't think I've ever read a Mills and Boon where the heroine goes from "hating" the male counterpart to having sex with him so quickly. I mean, in the space of a (short) paragraph.
The biscuit was well and truly taken, however, when Caesar quotes a line from Shakespeare, that the Bard attributes to Caesar himself. Never mind the fact that neither man ever met each other, nor that Caesar ever knew a single thing about the Bard. I think the author meant it as a cutesy in-joke, but it had me in paroxysms of fury; for once, the audio that I listen to so that I can distract myself from a stressful commute ended up making me far, far crosser than idiot drivers. This is also why this book gets one star, instead of the two I might otherwise have.
I'll cut the rant there, but rest assured, my blood pressure is still up there, and this book will stay with me for far longer than it merits.

A Coin for the Ferryman is a heaping helping of time travel and romance with a side of car chases and nefarious henchmen with guns. But most importantly it’s got Julius Caesar.

In 1999 Nobel winner Andrew Danicek assembles a team of elite scientists and researchers, all sworn to secrecy, for a daring project. Danicek has successfully engineered a time travel machine. He intends to establish its abilities, and demonstrate its usefulness by snatching Julius Caesar right before his betrayal on the Ides of March in 44 BC and transporting him to his lab in modern day Los Angeles.

The predecessors of this time machine allowed the user to dial in a specific time and place in the past and be able to view what happened there. Now, at the start of the book, the latest machine has successfully transported an inanimate object from, and returned it to, the past. The first half of the book takes us through the assembly of the team and the successful transportation of a living being - a dog that had once belonged to the medical doctor on the team.

I found the first half of the book to be a slow build, with lots more backstory than was really necessary to establish the book’s plot points. While the plot does move slowly in the first half, Edwards balances it with her ability to convey her characters and their surroundings. She is skillful at setting mood and painting pictures of the people in her stories.

I found the backstory on the time travel tech to be a bit sketchy. For reasons not fully fleshed out, once Julius Caesar was here in the present there were only two points in time where he could be sent back to the past - once very shortly after he arrived, and once again four days later. For such an important plot point I was disappointed that there wasn’t more to establish why these constraints existed.

Anyway, once Julius Caesar is transported, the pace of the book really takes off. The team had choreographed four days of scientific activity and researcher questioning for the Roman emperor. But Caesar suffers no fools, and quickly establishes his own agenda, escaping from what he perceives to be a kidnapping. He takes Cassandra, the young linguist from the team, with him.

What follows includes mad car chases, a plane ride forced down by bullet holes, and a hideout in, of all places, Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. There Cassandra and Caesar establish a real bond and a romance begins to blossom. Meanwhile the pair are being hunted by the dark suited henchman of the husband of one of the scientists. He’s in debt up to his eyeballs to the Russian Mob, and thinks Caesar is the way out of his problems. (If it’s ever explained why or how having Caesar will solve his problems I missed that part.) The rest of the book is a race against time and the bad guys to get Caesar back to the time machine so he can return to 44 BC at the four day deadline.

When I say the book is a heaping helping, I mean it. In book form it weighs in at 540 pages. In the audiobook version I listened to, it's over 13 hours long. So it’s an investment of your time. But if you can get through the slow build in the first half, and forgive the few plot holes, the second half of the book pays off - it might not be quite Dan-Brown-thriller level, but it is really good.

RATING: Three Stars ⭐⭐⭐

NOTE: I received a review copy of this audiobook from NetGalley and Imbrifex Books. I am voluntarily providing this review.

Thank you, NetGalley for allowing me to be able to both read and listen to this book. I will be writing an honest review of my experience.

Personally, I could not finish this book. At first, tried to listen to this book's audiobook because I like listening to them while doing things. However, I am very particular about the reader's voice so I had to switch to reading it instead. Although I progressed further in reading it myself, I had a hard time remembering this book's contents and maintaining my interest.

I will be trying to re-read this at another time when I think I am more prepared to dive into it. For now, it is a DNF.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this novel for an honest review. It has been published in March 2022.

"A Coin for the Ferryman" by Megan Edwards didn't do it for me. Too much exposition, too little action, and on top of that, I was put off by the big, fat streak of sexism that runs through the story. The female characters are introduced by a depressingly objectifying physical description, and thereafter they're constantly referred to by their highly sexualised physical attributes. Needless to say, the same doesn't apply to any of the male characters. Did a woman seriously write this??? It's the 21st century, for goodness sake, we don't need even more published novels that appeal to the male gaze.
On top of that, I'd have expected a bit more research to go into a book about Julius Caesar; instead, the anachronisms start right off the bat. Not even 3 minutes into the audiobook, Calpurnia uses the word "brute" as an insult, but... we're at a point in history when Brutus' betrayal hasn't happened yet, so how can the word "brute" be used as an insult? Since the murder of Julius Caesar is arguably the central point around which the whole novel revolves, I found this particular anachronism especially grating.
As for the narrator of the audiobook, I can't comment on the pronunciation of the bits in German, but he absolutely butchered the parts in Latin and French. Argh!

I enjoyed this audiobook. The narrator had a very engaging speaking voice. Early in the story, he pronounced a word strangely—just a single word. Otherwise, I was able to sink into the world of the Ides project without much protest.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to review this audiobook! Since it was 16+ hours, it took me a long time to complete it. I apologize for the delay. I would definitely recommend this story to my students as they express an interest in time travel, Rome, or any of the novel’s other unique topics.

This book was disappointing to say the least. I'd been so excited to request this book because the premise for it was so cool and unique, but this book moved SO slow and there was just too much stuff in this book that didn't need to be there in order to move the story forward. I would have much rather read a smaller book that moved the plot along at a decent pace than this huge slow moving monster of a book.

“In 1999, an elite interdisciplinary team headed by Nobel laureate Andrew Danicek gathered in California to carry out a ground-breaking time-travel experiment. While the rest of the world remained unaware, Julius Caesar was successfully transported from the last day of his life to a specially-constructed covert facility.”

Another book that just wasn’t for me. The premise for this book was fantastic. Time travel? Academia? Ancient Rome? Romance? This checked so many boxes. I just couldn’t get into the story, however. The author spent so much time on character backgrounds, that I was 40% into the story and still nothing had happened. Add to the glacial speed of the plot, the flatness of characters and the unaddressed misogyny, I was glad when this book was over.

4/10

Thanks to NetGalley and Imbrifex Books for this ARC.

This book drew me in I really loved this audiobook alot. It was shocking and had me on the edge of my seat while listening to it. I really liked the narrator also he was really good.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for providing an ARC in exchange for a fair review.

A Coin for the Ferryman is an interesting premise, involving time travel but instead of the main characters traveling to a different time, they invent a machine capable of transporting noteworthy individuals to the present.

I tried so hard not to DNF this, and maybe someday I'll finish it, but it's so problematic that I can't keep going.

The book tries for female empowerment but just reads like internalized misogyny. Every other sentence is some character remarking on how beautiful the main character, Cassandra is. Every single character underestimates and judges her based on her looks, then suddenly "how could anyone ever believe such a beautiful goddess could also be so smart?" EXCEPT for Faith, who starts out as a sympathetic character, if a bit unwise in her relationship choices, and then promptly gets recast as an immature, catty and whiny antagonist that is constantly mocked or put down by every other character. Beyond that, every single female character is always tearing up and blubbering and whining, while naturally none of the men ever do. If women cried as much as this author seems to think we could create an entirely new ocean out of women's tears.

There's a constant theme of dresses and heels making a real woman, literally every single character judges at least one of the women based on what they're wearing. Every single time there's a date change we have to go through who is wearing what and the POV character's judgy opinion of such. I don't need to know every single time Cassandra puts on a slinky black dress with stilettos and looks like a goddess, while Elizabeth is in her sweater that makes her look 10 years older and Faith looks like a "harlot" in her spandex. Seriously???

I'm pretty sure you could cut the length of this book by 30% just by removing mentions of Cassandra's beauty and outfit descriptions.

I'm assuming the author is trying to go for a power dynamics and corruption theme: naive girl gets in over her head, flies high and then everything comes falling down. It doesn't work.

The author also has a grossly nonchalant attitude towards death - ie. "the embalmers got to work on her flattened face" as a character recounts the death of his beloved grandmother. This happens multiple times with different characters, not a reflection of the character in that moment.

Gave it an extra star because the plot could have been interesting.

Just before Y2K a secret team of scientists, historians and linguists conduct a groundbreaking time travel experience, transporting Julius Caesar from the moment before his death to a specialized facility, where they hope to learn from him for several days. But things quickly spin out of control when someone attempts to kidnap Caesar.
I really liked the time travel escapade, but the first half of the book is very slow as there is so much set-up for the action. Also, whole sections of dialogue lacked contractions, which made it very stilted. Still, a fun read if you don't mind some uneven narrative pacing.
2.5/5

It's very rare that a book stays with me... haunts me... and makes me want to reread it. This is one of the few novels that I didn't expect to make my top 10 list, but it has. I always LOVED teaching Julius Caesar with my 10th graders. It's always fun and exciting. I feel like if I were given the chance to go back in time and talk to Caesar - I totally would. So some really smart and powerful people team up to conquer time travel. The parameters of the experiment are limited to people on the verge of death so they wouldn't be able to talk about the time travel and it would have limited affects on the current timeline. Having to know exactly when and where they would die was a must and narrowed down the potentials for this experiment. The first test with a living being was on the doctor's dog. She brought her dog back for a few minutes before it was hit by a car in the past... but it's not so easy to let go of the past. And Faith isn't the same after the experiments success. Can the team successfully pull off the biggest kidnapping ever? What will Caesar think of Caesar's Palace in Vegas? Can the past truly stay just in the past? Read on to find out!

The first half of the book is a slow build, but it's worth it for the second half. Trust me. I was disconnected for part of the first half and confused - but it does all come together.

Also - some of the book takes place in Vegas and specifically mentions the high school I used to teach for. So that was awesome!

#ACoinforTheFerryman #MeganEdwards #ImbrifexBooks #NetGalley

An intriguing and fantastical premise involving time travel and a historical figure. What would it be like to bring back Julius Caesar to life from just four days prior to his death on the Ides of March? That is the vision of the Ides Project conceived by Andrew Danicek and his team comprising of scientists, historians, and scholars in Latin. To not interfere with the time-space continuum, Caesar is to be returned to the past after four days, to meet his destiny. Cassandra, the youngest member of the team, plays a decisive and vital role in the story. What follows is an interesting blend of action and adventure with a touch of romance. In a nutshell, “He came. He saw. She conquered”.

I enjoyed this ALC. Mark Ashby does a fine job of bringing the characters to life through his narration.