A Voice in the Wind

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Synopsis

Hadassah is a Jewish Christian girl who is the sole survivor of her family following the Roman siege on Jerusalem. She is captured and sold into slavery, transported to Rome, where she is bought by the Valerians, a wealthy merchant family, who press her into service as a personal handmaid to their daughter, Julia. Hadassah is determined to treat her owners with respect and obedience as her faith directs her to, but she struggles between wanting to share her faith with them and needing to keep it a secret for fear of being sent to the arena. Hadassah shows love toward Julia in spite of her mistress's selfishness, petulance, and hedonistic lifestyle. After being widowed twice, Julia fancies herself in love with Atretes, a Germanic warrior who was captured on the battlefield and enslaved but who has risen through the ranks to become a popular and successful gladiator. But Julia's self-centered nature may destroy their relationship. Meanwhile Julia's brother, Marcus, although rather hedonistic himself, is more compassionate toward Hadassah and finds himself drawn to the slave girl. Marcus and Hadassah begin to fall in love, but differences in their social stations and faiths could keep them apart. And when Julia thinks that Hadassah has disrespected her brother, she does the unthinkable to seek revenge.

Review

A Voice in the Wind is the first book of Francine Rivers's Mark of the Lion series, an inspirational, historical fiction saga set in Ancient Rome, not long after Christ walked the Earth. It features an ensemble cast of characters, but the main ones are Hadassah, a Jewish Christian slave girl; her mistress, Julia; Julia's brother, Marcus; and Atretes, an enslaved gladiator. Hadassah is caught up in the Roman siege on Jerusalem, and when the city falls and her entire family is killed, leaving her as the only survivor, she's sold into slavery. After changing hands a few times, she ends up in service to the Valerian family and is specifically given to their daughter, Julia, as a handmaiden. Julia is about the same age as Hadassah, but she's a selfish, petulant girl who resents having decisions made for her by her father and older brother, but even when she's able to make some choices of her own, she struggles to do the right thing. After two husbands die, she fancies herself in love with the gladiator, Atretes. He's a warrior from Germania, who was fighting against a Roman invasion of his homeland, when he was caught and enslaved, trained to fight in the arena. Although he hates Rome and all of its people, he can't seem to help being attracted to Julia, but it's an ill-fated love affair. Meanwhile, Marcus slowly begins to fall in love with the gentle Hadassah. Although he knows that she's beginning to fall for him, too, she refuses to share his bed and he's not inclined to force her. After much contemplation, he tries to persuade Julia to free Hadassah so he can marry her, but when Hadassah turns him down because he doesn't yet share her faith, Julia does the unthinkable in revenge. This family saga is set against the backdrop of the decadence of the Roman Empire and their pantheon of gods, the bloodthirsty people who regularly attend the games at the arena and cheer on the death and destruction of human life in horrific ways, and the brave, brawny, sometimes arrogant gladiators who put their lives on the line every time for the people's amusement in hopes of winning their freedom.

Hadassah is a gentle Jewish girl who became a convert to Christianity. Her father preached the Good News in the streets of Jerusalem every day in spite of the risk to his life, but when the Romans besieged the city, the family struggled to survive. Hadassah's mother and sister eventually succumbed to starvation, while her brother was killed by Roman soldiers. She never quite knew what became of her father, but assumed he, too, was killed. Hadassah, being the only survivor, was swept up and placed on a slave ship with others. Just a tiny young woman, she has little value, but through God's grace, she avoids being sent to the arena. Instead, she is purchased by a fellow Jew who serves the Valerian family and brought to their home. Phoebe, the matriarch, decides to gift Hadassah to their daughter, Julia, as a handmaiden. At first Julia doesn't want her, thinking her ugly, and often treats her with disdain, but Hadassah gradually earns Julia's favor through her stories and songs that amuse Julia and by serving her mistress with humility. Hadassah comes to love Julia like a sister in spite of the girl's petulant nature and is always there for her. She also begins to fall in love with Julia's brother, Marcus, even though she knows nothing can come of it. She refuses to merely warm his bed, and even when Marcus arranges for her freedom and asks her to marry him, she believes she can't because they don't share the same faith, which leads to Julia turning on her. Hadassah is the perfect servant, meek, humble, kind, compassionate, and long-suffering. And therein lay a problem for me. I felt like she was a little too perfect. Aside from her having trouble sharing her faith out of fear that she might be killed, which was understandable, she has no real flaws. She does everything she's told and loves her mistress's entire family unconditionally. I think perhaps the author was trying to make her an archetype of Christ, but even He sometimes lost patience with people. I just think she needed a few more flaws to make her realistic and believable.

Julia is just fifteen when the story opens, and even at that young age, she's rather haughty and selfish. She has her older brother, Marcus wrapped around her little finger, persuading him to take her to the games at the arena for the first time in defiance of their father's wishes. Her father arranges a marriage to an intellectual man who is old enough to be her father. Julia despises her new husband and is bored to tears at his country villa. The only bright spot is seeing a handsome gladiator on the road every day, going through his training drills. Eventually her husband dies tragically, after which Julia returns to her father's house, but a friend introduces her to Calabah, a woman who encourages other women to be more independent. She becomes Julia's mentor, molding her into her own image, after which Julia becomes more and more unhinged, doing only what pleases her (and what Calabah tells her to do) at the expense of others. After a second marriage ends with the death of her husband, she begins to pursue Atretes, the gladiator who's caught her fancy. She believes she's fallen in love with him, but doesn't want yet another man controlling her, so she makes highly questionable decisions. Those choices lead to more and more heartache and destruction as she gradually loses all sense of self or conscience, ending with betraying Hadassah, the slave who had always looked out for her and done nothing but try to please her, in the worst possible way. I started out being somewhat sympathetic to Julia. She could be pretty irritating with her sense of entitlement, but I understood that some of her unhappiness was rooted in her being a woman who had very little control over her own life or decisions. She had no say in who her first husband would be, and after he died, she had no say over the large estate she inherited. I could easily understand her frustration. But when she kept making bad choices over and over again, never seeming to think of the consequences to anyone, I really lost patience with her. I think maybe the author is setting her up for some kind of grand Christian redemption arc, but after what she did to Hadassah, and with glee I might add, I'm just over her.

Atretes grew up in the woods of northern Germania, where he became a great warrior. He had a beloved wife and was about to become a father, when both his wife and baby died in childbirth. After the Romans invaded, he bravely fought by his father's side, and he'd just become chieftain of his clan following his father's death on the battlefield. Then the Roman soldiers cornered him alone, capturing him, but he fought so bravely, they decided to sell him to a slaver who acquired men for the gladiator arena. Atretes resented all of the Romans he encountered but eventually realized he had little choice but to go along with the gladiator training and to fight, hoping to one day earn his freedom. He becomes one of the greatest gladiators Rome has ever seen, earning the admiration of the bloodthirsty crowds at every games. Knowing that his time in the arena could be fleeting if the crowd decides to be fickle and turn on him, he fights with everything he has in every match. Early in his training he caught sight of Julia and admired her from afar, so when she comes seeking his attention years later, he eagerly becomes her lover. However, Julia wants to call the shots in their relationship, and that doesn't sit well with Atretes. He's on the cusp of a match that, if he can win it, will give him back his freedom and will make it possible for him to marry Julia, but she might sabotage his efforts with her selfish decisions. Atretes seems like a halfway decent guy, but he's a little too intensely alpha for my taste. I know he had to be in order to survive and reach the heights he did in the arena, but that type of guy just isn't my cup of tea. He's pretty prideful, too, never even considering Julia's proposition (not that I thought it was a great option) and rejecting his own child (at least at first). After all the killing he'd done both on the battlefield and in the arena, he at least had enough conscience left to regret some of the things he'd done, but he has a ways to go to earn my genuine admiration.

Marcus's father is a wealthy merchant from Ephesus, who bought his Roman citizenship and has become an influential man in Rome. Marcus is following in his father's footsteps in that he, too, is working on becoming a self-made businessman. However, where his father is conservative and traditional in his values, Marcus is more the type to live life to fullest, whether that means taking many lovers, going to the games regularly, or partying it up with his friends. However, while he is said to live a rather over indulgent lifestyle, we don't really see a whole lot of that in the narrative. It's mostly in the background and told more than shown. Marcus adores his sister and will do almost anything for Julia, but even he has his limits. He doesn't necessarily like some of the choices she makes along the way, but he assures her that nothing she could do would drive him away... until she does something so unthinkable that he never could have predicted it. From the moment Hadassah comes to be a part of his father's household, Marcus senses something different about her. He doesn't understand how someone can be so kind and serene all the time, but her peaceful spirit draws him to her until he starts to realize that he's falling in love with her. He wants to take her to his bed, but she refuses. In this, I have to say that I really respected Marcus a lot for showing consideration toward Hadassah's wishes and not taking it any further. Even if she had consented, though, I wouldn't have been comfortable with it because of the power differential in the master/slave relationship. However, he does continue to pursue Hadassah right up to a marriage proposal, so when she still refuses him because of the differences in their faiths, he's very hurt. Overall, Marcus seemed like a good guy who showed genuine care and concern for Hadassah, and although he frequently disagreed with his father about many things, he also clearly loves his family very much, too. Out of all the main characters, though, I felt like I got to know the least about him.

Years ago, after reading Francine Rivers's incomparable romance novel, Redeeming Love, I recall looking for more of her work and found her Mark of the Lion series. I believe I only read the first two books, though, because the third hadn't been released yet. I didn't remember much of the story, except a general sense that I'd liked it. I have no idea what I would have rated A Voice in the Wind back then, but on this second reading, it just didn't grab me the way I thought it would. First of all, I didn't really consider it to be a romance like it's sometimes classified online by both readers and bookstores. Yes, Marcus and Hadassah come to love each other, but they share minimal interactions and like I mentioned there's that uncomfortable power differential as well. There's some kissing, but they don't really spend a lot of time alone together, really getting to know one another or find themselves in any genuinely romantic scenarios. Therefore, the progression of their relationship isn't in any way indicative of a traditional romance. Not to mention, at the point where this book ends, there's no HEA. Likewise, Atretes and Julia's relationship wasn't really romantic to me at all, because it felt more like a toxic mess filled with never-ending drama that didn't end well either. Julia's other marriages were equally as fraught and unsatisfying.

Another issue I had was that out of all the characters in the story, Hadassah is the only one who is portrayed as genuinely good, but as I said earlier, she was just too perfect. It simply felt like she was the good and faithful servant who is constantly beleaguered by the whims and beliefs of others, while everyone else in the story is painted in shades of evil. Granted Marcus and Julia's parents aren't bad people, but they're still portrayed in a not good way because of their beliefs (it's a Christian story, so I get it, but still...). Marcus is supposedly greedy and sybaritic, although he has moments of goodness, but in many ways, I felt those better choices seem to be influenced by his feelings for Hadassah. Although Atretes had little choice in becoming a gladiator, he can be pretty arrogant and self-indulgent, not to mention a stone-cold killer in the arena. He does have moments of conscience, but again some of it is driven by meeting Hadassah when he enters a relationship with Julia. And don't even get me started on Julia who, by the end, had totally gotten on my last nerve. I was also troubled by the portrayals of Julia's friends Calabah and Primus. Calabah is introduced as a feminist type of character who is encouraging women to live more independently from men, which IMO isn't a bad thing in and of itself, but she inexplicably turns into a hateful, silver-tongued devil-woman, whispering lies and half-truths into Julia's ear, making her even more unhinged. I never really understood Calabah's motivations either. She just seemed evil for the sake of being evil (maybe a Satan archetype), which came off as an extreme caricature when she could have been more nuanced. Primus is the only gay character shown in any detail, but he's basically portrayed as a pedophile, living with a fourteen-year-old boy as his lover, which perpetuates a horrible and dangerous stereotype that does real harm to the gay community. I'm guessing that at least the main characters are being set up for a Christian redemption arc, but having all of them and the entirety of Roman civilization painted as virtually nothing but evil was a bit much. I know that the Roman Empire was a pretty decadent and indulgent society, but surely there must have been some good and decent people there other than the handful of Christians Hadassah meets along the way.

I really thought I was going to enjoy this reread of A Voice in the Wind, but it ended up being so-so. It started out pretty well, but the rather extreme portrayals of all the characters kind of started ruining it for me. Hadassah is just so kind and sweet and gentle that I wanted everyone to like her, and on some level, most do, but others outright despise her for no good reason other than her race or her faith. When they find out about her faith, nearly everyone taunts her mercilessly. The only ones who don't are the Valerian siblings' parents, Phoebe and Decimus, and Julia's first husband, Claudius. Otherwise, it felt like a case of everyone hates Hadassah or at least her chosen religion with very few shades of gray. Between this and Julia's incessant whining and bad decision-making, the story just felt really heavy and melodramatic and only became more so as it went on. The author definitely brings the brutality of the gladiator games to life in a realistic way, almost horrifyingly so, particularly in the manner that the crowds celebrate the blood-letting and act like the human lives lost are worthless. I could tell that she had done a lot of research, but the extreme nature of this as well only added to the dreariness of the narrative. Overall, the writing was pretty good, but I found myself frustrated with a lack of the deep POV that I crave in any story. There was a lot of head-hopping, and I didn't always understand the characters' motivations, which is probably why I felt like all of them were so extreme in their portrayals. I often felt like things were simply being told to me rather than shown. Still, I was prepared to give A Voice in the Wind four stars until the incessant drama continued right up until the final pages. It ends on a cliffhanger, too, so there's no real resolution to anything. Because I had trouble stomaching the depressing nature of it all, I ended up dropping a half-star. I have some vague sense that I might have liked the second book better, so I might give it another try at some point. But I'm going to need some time to recover from this one first, because it was a bit too much for me.

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Francine Rivers