Review of Jennifer Jeanne McArdle, “When to Choose the Snake God,” Luna Station Quarterly 61 (2025): 15-31 — Purchase online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.
Content note: child slavery.
I found this story intriguing because it rejects a lot of tenets that we might ordinarily take for granted — that a captured child might prefer a life of servitude in the empire than the life in the provinces that they’d left behind; that given a choice to return home, that choice might not be worth making; that sometimes it is better to die for a god than to live for it.
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