Review written by Nicola
I couldn’t put this down, and it’s the first of a series of four books so I pretty much took two weeks out in November and time travelled to England of almost 2,000 years ago, reading all of them in one go.
So many of the books I read are what some would call text books, so I love it when I find an author who has taken the facts and woven a story around them. I love the way Manda has taken the story of Boudica and interpreted what life was like back then before the Romans occupied our Islands. For me, it’s the ancient whisper of a time before control and domineering power structures, a glimpse into a life where people lived close to the land and understood the magic within it.
In this, the first book of the series, Manda tells the story of Boudica from when she was twelve years old. We look through a window into what tribal life might have been like in the Eceni tribe living in what is now northern East Anglia. Communities made up of Warriors, Dreamers, Healers and Singers, guided by the grandmothers, ancestors, animal spirit guides and nature, always respectful of the land. A life where the Rites of Passage were performed as an integral part of becoming an adult, where the threat of attack from neighbouring tribes was always present, always real.
The following three books, Dreaming the Bull, Dreaming the Hound and Dreaming the Serpent Spear take us through to the final battle, which Boudica is so famous for even twenty centuries after it was fought. In the last uprising against the Romans on British soil, so many gave their lives fighting for something so precious they were willing to die for it. These books give a taste of what that freedom felt like, and a chance to lose ourselves in it once more, even if just only in our minds.
Click here to buy it on Amazon, it’s available for Kindle too!