One of my favorite small details is that early on we are introduced to a fruit called azurine, a clear statement if you're looking that this world isn't ours: no fruit that we have is pure blue.
Although it seems close enough to our world to have had the Etruscans and a different Italic city than Rome rising to imperial prominence, which got my attention from the list of dramatis personae because even if it was just done for the unusual quality of the language, basically nobody doing secondary worlds steals from Etruscan rather than any other substrate of our ancient world and it attracts me just as much as the fact that this entire book sounds like it could be soundtracked to a really punk version of "Bread and Roses," point me toward one if you know it.
(I was able to read the first couple of chapters before Google Books punted me and I get that people in this world also have intermingled Anglophone names, e.g. the protagonist, but seriously do not name your cities Cisra or Bellona or Veltuna—or your characters Ramtha or Uthste or Prumathe—if you do not want your prospective reader to go absolutely feral over the possibility of an Etruscan AU even if it's more like Turner's Little Peninsula.)
(Although in a book this queer, Bellona is probably a Delany homage as much as anything.)
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Although it seems close enough to our world to have had the Etruscans and a different Italic city than Rome rising to imperial prominence, which got my attention from the list of dramatis personae because even if it was just done for the unusual quality of the language, basically nobody doing secondary worlds steals from Etruscan rather than any other substrate of our ancient world and it attracts me just as much as the fact that this entire book sounds like it could be soundtracked to a really punk version of "Bread and Roses," point me toward one if you know it.
(I was able to read the first couple of chapters before Google Books punted me and I get that people in this world also have intermingled Anglophone names, e.g. the protagonist, but seriously do not name your cities Cisra or Bellona or Veltuna—or your characters Ramtha or Uthste or Prumathe—if you do not want your prospective reader to go absolutely feral over the possibility of an Etruscan AU even if it's more like Turner's Little Peninsula.)
(Although in a book this queer, Bellona is probably a Delany homage as much as anything.)