The House with the Golden Door by Elodie Harper

Book review with Turn the Page Tours!

Thank you!

Thank you Turn the Page Tours, for the chance to read and review The House with the Golden Door by Elodie Harper. I also want to thank them for their patience, because I managed to mix up my tour date and I’m very late!

Also a shout out to NetGalley for having helped facilitate this! What would the internet be like if we didn’t have NetGalley for our arcs!

Housekeeping

The House with the Golden Door is the second book in the Wolf Den Trilogy by Elodie Harper and the sequel to The Wolf Den. The series follows the life of the slave Amara as she works in a brothel and tries to survive. While the first book is about her time in the brothel, this sequel continues with her life as a concubine to Rufus, who purchased her freedom.

The book is 454 pages long and was published by Union Square & Co. on the 6th of September 6. Amazon broadly places it under the historical fiction and historical romance categories.

Review

Not gonna lie to you; at one point, I wanted to put the book down just because I was so worried for Amara and didn’t know if I could handle it. Elodie Harper doesn’t fall into the trap of having a first book that’s better than the second.

I’m not good at writing spoiler-free reviews, so if you need a rating (four out of five stars) and want to switch over to someone else on tour, now would be the time!

There are many things Elodie Harper does really well in this book! The PTSD and how Amara is tormented by dreams and past events. The weird dynamic with Felix, whom she hates but also wants to conquer and be respected by. The change in dynamics between her and the other women from the brothel. The way people don’t have the privilege of being good all the time; how survival means looking out for yourself more than anything. I was also heartbroken to see what happened between the women, who for so long protected each other!

Some parts of this were odd to me, and I don’t know how I feel about them in this book, which is why it’s at 4 stars instead of five.

Amara does some idiotic things in this book. She purchases her friend for significantly more than she can afford without telling the man she’s very dependent on and her relationship with Philos. Both of these things were stupid and reckless, and I didn’t like Philos. I don’t like that he just assumed Amara knew everything instead of telling her something about the contract she had with Rufus and her child’s status.

I’m looking forward to the third book and how the series ends! I would love to see novellas based on some of the other women to get an even better sense of who they are and how they came to be (just dropping a hint, Elodie!).

About Elodie Harper

Elodie Harper is a journalist and prize-winning writer. She is currently a reporter and presenter at ITV News, and before that worked as a producer for Channel 4 News. Elodie studied Latin poetry both in the original and in translation as part of her English Literature degree at Oxford, instilling a lifelong interest in the ancient world. The Wolf Den, the first in a trilogy of novels about the lives of women in ancient Pompeii, was a number one London Times bestseller. Elodie lives in the UK. You can visit her at elodieharper.com and find her @ElodieLHarper.