By Richard Platt
A made-up girl's diary of everyday life in ancient Rome, packed with real detail and lavish illustrations of the whole city.
Iliona is a Greek girl captured by pirates and sold into slavery in Rome, and this is her diary of the year that follows. Through her eyes a child sees the real texture of Roman life, the crowded streets, the baths, the food, the schooling, a grand household, the games at the amphitheater, all annotated and illustrated in gorgeous, map-like detail by David Parkins. It's fiction wrapped around solid history, so it reads like a story but teaches like a textbook. A child finishes it knowing what it actually felt like to live in the city at its height.
For a Rome unit this is the book that makes the daily life stick, because it hangs all the facts on a character a child cares about. The diary format and the dense, browsable illustrations pull in readers who'd stall in a straight history, and Iliona's outsider view, she's new to Rome too, means the explanations feel natural rather than lectured. It stands alone for any reader in the room, and it's a strong read-aloud with plenty to look at.