Book Review: Feast of Sorrow, by Crystal King

All book reviews are on a five-star scale. The following review contains mild spoilers for Feast of Sorrow, by Crystal King.

If you know me, you know that I will happily devour any story set in ancient Rome—so when I ran across Feast of Sorrow, a historical novel that dramatizes the story of the Roman author of the world’s oldest cookbook, I was already sold. Slow-paced but charming, Crystal King’s debut novel is a thoughtful feast that makes up for its technical flaws with a lot of heart.

In Feast of Sorrow, a nineteen-year-old slave named Thrasius is bought by Marcus Gavius Apicius, a temperamental Roman gourmand who has one goal: to become the emperor’s culinary advisor. With the help of Thrasius’s excellent cooking, Apicius’s fame begins to spread throughout the Roman elite. Among his master’s household—Apicius’s wife Aelia, his daughter Apicata, and the lovely handmaiden Passia—Thrasius finds a family for the first time in his life. But as Apicius builds his legacy, he also attracts the attention of old enemies. When Apicius’s reckless ambition threatens everyone Thrasius loves, both men are forced to reckon with the cost of ambition—a cost that may prove too high, even for a man as rich as Apicius.

I really enjoyed this book, which RT Book Reviews aptly described as “the Food Network meets HBO’s Rome.” Crystal King lovingly crafts mouth-watering descriptions of Thrasius’s cooking. In one of his feasts, Thrasius serves “plate after plate of marinated mushrooms, Baian beans in mustard sauce, pork meatballs, honey melons, stuffed boiled eggs, fried veal slices, crunchy duck and flamingo tongues, pork pastries stuffed with figs, pear patinae, steamed lamb, soufflés of little fishes.” This is not simply a Roman soap opera with food as a backdrop. Throughout the novel, King ensures that the cooking remains centerstage, even as the drama rises.

That being said, the pace is a little slow, even meandering at times. For example, King includes a section in which Apicius sails along the coast of North Africa to find more delicious prawns than the ones he normally cooks with, discovers the prawns are no better than in Italy, and then sails off angrily for home. (Spoiler alert: The prawns never become plot-relevant.) But even though I wish the plot were a little tighter, there is still something charming about all the loosely connected plot threads, especially in our age of short attention spans. Once I abandoned all expectation of a fast-paced drama, I found the narrative’s quiet ebb and flow relaxing. By the end of the novel, I genuinely felt as though I had lived many years alongside these characters.

As a result of its easy pace, the novel is not a page-turner. Conflicts arise only to be quickly resolved. For example, King spends a lot of time in the novel’s early pages developing Apicius’s mother, a villainous character who is constantly plotting to kill Thrasius—but long before the tension has a chance to build, the problem is solved without any long-lasting consequences. Similarly, all obstacles to Thrasius’s budding relationship with Passia, another one of Apicius’s slaves, are easily removed by the narrative.

But the heart of this book is the slow-building friendship between Thrasius and his master, Apicius, who eventually sets him free. I was especially moved by this friendship because King resists the urge to soften Apicius’s rough edges. Though Apicius learns a few lessons along the way, he never quite manages to overcome his many flaws. In one passage near the end of the novel, Thrasius wonders why he puts up with Apicius:

“How did I endure him? I thought a lot about that over the coming weeks as I prepared for the meal. Apicius tried my patience at every twist and turn. Why, then, did I put up with his mood swings and irrationalities? A sane person would have left long before. Was I insane? No, I had to admit I did it because Apicius was my friend, my family, and because without me he was nothing; he had nothing. I thought of himself in his place—I would want a friend by my side.”

Thrasius is not blind to his friend’s faults. Paradoxically, because Thrasius is Apicius’s closest (and perhaps his only) friend, Thrasius is the person most hurt by Apicius’s worst traits. Not only that, but nothing ties Thrasius to his former master’s household: by the end of the novel, he already has his freedom, a child, and the love of his life. He is bound to Apicius only by extraordinary empathy—the duty of a brotherly love that defies transactional logic. He stays not because Apicius is worthy of his friendship, but because Thrasius’s friendship is strong enough to love someone unworthy of it.

In Feast of Sorrow, Crystal King suggests that everyone, no matter how flawed, is worthy of love. The point is not that Thrasius’s friendship changes Apicius for the better, although it does (albeit in very small ways). The point is that there is no prerequisite for love. No matter how deep your faults, there is nothing you must accomplish to deserve the devotion of at least one true friend.

Like Apicius, this novel is flawed. But like Apicius, it is also rich, complex, and worthy of love. I give Crystal King’s Feast of Sorrow three stars.