The Boudica series, by Manda Scott

Having seen this series recommended online a few times, I checked the first book (virtually) out of the library to take on vacation with me. After reading it, I immediately wanted to get back into reliable wifi range, which was sketchy for a lot of our vacation, so that I could download the rest of the books and finish the series.

This is a fictional re-creation of the life of Boudica/Boadicea, a queen or warrior leader among the early Britons who resisted the Roman invasion — unsuccessfully, but she more than gave the Romans a run for their money. But it’s so much more than that. It’s a vividly reimagined picture — based on archeology, and on extrapolation from indigenous group in other places, along with a healthy dose of imagination — as to what the lives of people in Britain might have been like before the Roman invasion, and how the Iceni (Boudica’s tribe) and other tribes might have experienced and resisted that invasion (and not always resisted — as always with invasions, there were some collaborators as well, British tribes who gambled that their best hope of survival might be to cooperate with the Romans). It’s peopled by a huge cast of characters, all the main ones vividly drawn and memorable, especially Boudica herself and her brother Ban, kidnapped at a young age, raised among Romans, and torn by divided loyalties.

There are huge fictional leaps here — the biggest one being that the author imagines the two towering figures of British resistance, Boudica and the Catuvellauni leader Caractacus/Caradoc, as knowing each other and having a close relationship. Both are mentioned separately in Roman accounts of the invasion, conquest, and resistance of Britain, but given the relationships amongst the different tribes and how they both clashed with each other, and worked together against the foreign invader, as Scott has imagined their world, it doesn’t strain credibility too much. I got completely caught up in this series and really enjoyed it.