Romans Had Refrigerators?? Feast of Sorrow Enlightens

It’s the morning after Feast of Sorrow’s book launch, and I bet Crystal is waking up thinking, “Holy Cr@p! My book is out!” Except, I don’t know, maybe she isn’t cursing to herself because she’s a slightly more polite person than I am!

Don’t pinch yourself, Crystal! It’s real. Launch day arrived, and Feast of Sorrow is now out into the world. As a fellow writer who also spent the better part of a decade working towards a debut book, I can understand the surreal feeling.

Once again, I am regretting the decision to follow Amy’s blog posts. Her tribute to Feast of Sorrow yesterday was hysterical! Haven’t read it? Check it out now. To summarize: Amy wrote about how she would approach historical fiction if she was the author. Basically, the characters would all be operating as if they were in 2017. They’d have cell phones obviously. Me? I’d be the complete opposite! All of my characters would be neanderthals.

I have this erroneous idea that technology has advanced at an even pace. So I tabulate the changes I’ve seen in my lifetime over the last three decades and try to extrapolate that rate of change to 2,000 years ago, and suddenly ancient Romans were single-cell amoebas!  Okay, not really. But I’ll admit sometimes I’m surprised by the most basic concepts of their lives. The buildings! The furniture! The parties! The exquisite food! And did you know that they used to import snow so that they could have chilled rooms to store food?!

This week Crystal has asked us to write about how historical fiction has affected us, and I can honestly say that novels like Feast of Sorrow have shaped my entire worldview. Without talented and meticulous authors like Crystal – who spend ages researching and carefully recreating times of the past – I would have a completely misconstrued idea of history. Dry textbooks would never have been able to help me understand the evolution of the human race and our societies and how we ended up here, at this point of time in 2017.

One word for Feast of Sorrow: rich. The characters and their struggles and their world (sophisticated world, I’d add) sucked me, and I’m so excited that the novel is out for other readers to love too.

Congratulations, Crystal!! Enjoy this week. You deserve every triumphant feeling.

Author: Lynn K Hall

Lynn Hall is a memoirist, activist in the movement to end sexual violence, ultra-runner, and crazy cat lady. Her memoir, CAGED EYES: AN AIR FORCE CADET’S STORY OF RAPE AND RESILIENCE, was published by Beacon Press in February 2017. Her writing has previously appeared in the New York Times, The LA Times, Hippocampus Magazine, The Sexual Assault Report, The Manifest-Station, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, and elsewhere. In the summers, Lynn copes with publication anxiety by spending too many days in the Colorado mountains, and in the winters, with pans of brownies. She lives in Boulder with her partner and their 23 cats. Just kidding…she only has five.