Mother of Rome

In Bear’s superb follow-up to Medusa’s Sisters, she centers another pair of women largely unheard from in Roman myths, overshadowed by the men who manipulated and used them or the kings they bore. Cousins Rhea and Antho grow up as sisters, the children of King Numitor and his conniving brother Amulius. When Rhea’s family is ripped asunder and Amulius usurps the throne, both women find their lives irrevocably altered, but they find ways to take back their own stories and seek glimmers of hope too. Fierce Rhea is sent to become a Vestal Virgin, though she joins pregnant with the god Mars’s children (Romulus and Remus), leading her down a path of motherhood and sacrifice she’d never have imagined. Antho, meanwhile, risks everything to choose love, quietly altering the future from within the Regia. Themes of sisterhood and motherhood, nature and wildness, survival, and love in its many forms resonate throughout. Bear weaves a layered, captivating story of the two tenacious women behind the birth of Rome that will resonate with readers long after the final page.