Inceptio - Alison Morton - Guest Book Review

Published by SilverWood Books

Guest review by Wendy Rowley

Alternative history novels are quite commonplace now but they mostly "turn" on fairly recent events such as a different outcome to WW2 or how things might have been different if Kennedy had survived. In Inceptio the premise starts further back, what if the Roman Empire hadn't completely fallen, and what if that empire was run by women.

So with this as the basis we have a female narrator in her early 20s, living in the Eastern United States who discovers she is the heir to a powerful dynasty in Roma Nova. There's a threat to her life and she has to flee to Roma Nova to survive. This all sounds like the basis of a good story. However I found the narrator to be annoyingly conceited - every time she gets into a scrape she has to come out on top and brag to the reader about it. I also found it very sexist against men. Obviously with the women of the empire having all the power this is likely to happen but it made me think of the James Bond books in reverse, which of course didn't do women any favours but were set in the 1960s and true to society of the time. 

Inceptio is set in the 2010s and I would expect a less sexist attitude. With this in mind it's hard to see who the target audience is meant to be. In some ways it is a lot like The Hunger Games books but I am not sure it would appeal to teens in the same way. Overall it was entertaining but predictable. I would mark it 7/10.

Many thanks to Wendy for reading and reviewing Inceptio for The Little Reader Library!