Sparrow
James Hynes
Dreamscape Media
Narrated by: Theo Solomon
Format: Audio book
4 Stars

From the moment our main character Sparrow becomes aware of himself as boy and a roman slave, his life seems bleak and brutal. He doesn’t know where he has come from, his parents, or anything of his past. His name keeps changing, but he identifies with the Sparrows he sees up in the garden, and in a story he is told about the birds. He often flies up out of himself to be the Sparrow itself when his own life become unbearable.

The story is very bleak – and this is indeed going to be an awful life as a young boy being brought-up in a brothel. You guess at what is to come, but it is very hard to bear witness to when it does – with rape and child abuse. But there is love in there too, with the family of wounded characters that form the only family he knows.

Each character is beautifully written, and each has their own sorrowful tale – the cook and the other wolves who have found themselves sold into this brutal existence in the brothel. Sparrow is also a compelling insight into what life would be like in Roman times.

Theo Solomon is excellent as the narrator, negotiating characters from a small boy, the wolves to grumpy old slaves and the roman gentry.

Thanks to James Hynes, Dreamscape Media, and NetGalley for an advance audio edition of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Format: audiobook ~ Narrator: Theo Solomon
Content: 4 stars ~ Narration: 4.5 stars

Sparrow is a story of an orphaned and nameless boy brought up in a brothel on the Spanish coast in the years of the Roman Empire. Others call him simply Pusus (boy), Little One, or Mouse. But he likes to call himself Sparrow. He doesn’t know where he comes from or who his parents are. Raised by wolves in an environment not suited for a small child. Wolves are prostitutes in a brothel named after muses. Their world is everything he knows. They are all he has, and he learns from them. Tender Euterpe and her lover, down-to-earth cook, ambitious Melpomene, their bodyguard, rough Audo: they are his family.

The novel carefully and thoroughly depicts the harsh life of Roman slaves. Written in a brutal and painfully honest narrative. Among others, it contains explicit descriptions of rape and child abuse. So this novel won’t be for every reader, I’m sure.

Still, Sparrow is a novel worth reading. This novel transports the reader to the brutal times of the Roman Empire. It is a novel about endurance, love, and pain. This is a slower-paced but precise character study of a child slave in the Roman Empire.

Thanks to Dreamscape Media for the advanced copy and this opportunity! This is a voluntary review and all opinions are my own.

Just when I thought I had been inundating myself with enough stories set in Ancient Rome to get through every brutal narrative, I received this one. It's one of those books that hurt to read, even if you don't consider yourself particularly sensitive to the usual content warnings. Be aware that this novel contains explicit descriptions of enslavement, rape and child abuse, which by no means get trivialized through the narrative.

And it's still a beautiful book, told from the perspective of an old man looking back at his beginnings - his earliest memories being those of growing up in a brothel on the Iberian peninsula just as all Roman citizens are declared Christians by the emperor. With no knowledge of his origins, his true name, or of the world outside the drab household at first, he is lovingly raised by the "wolves" at the lupanarium, named after the Greek Muses.

As the boy goes through infancy, childhood, and finally early adolescence, he takes on multiple names - multiple personalities - in order to survive in turn what his enslaved mothers are forced to endure every night. This hostile environment inhabited by other, more threatening characters constitutes his normality. Hynes doesn't hold back on the direct descriptions, and poses the question: What happens when a child is left completely unprotected by society?

Don't save Sparrow for a fun little summer read by the beach, the way I did.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Dreamscape Media for the free audio book in exchange for my honest review. This is narrated by Theo Solomon who does a fantastic job!

This is such an impressive literary work depicting the harshness of life through the eyes of a slave boy working in a tavern that is a brothel in a Roman town in Spain. Themes include sex workers, brothels, family, slavery and freedom.

The prose is quite descriptive, at times very blunt and this should not be read by the faint of heart. At times I found it hard listening to hardness of the life lived by the slaves and the "wolves" or prostitutes working night after night entertaining the "punters". But, the hardest part is understanding the life of the little boy slave, unworthy of even a name. He is called only "Pusus" or "boy", but might also be called Antiochus, or Mouse, or Little One, or even the name he calls himself - Sparrow.

This historic tale is well researched and rich in detail and context. Its long but worth the listen or read!