The House with the Golden Door is the second novel in the Wolf Den Trilogy. You can find my review for the first novel, The Wolf Den, here. If you have not read The Wolf Den yet, then do not read this review of The House with the Golden Door as it contains spoilers for The Wolf Den.

While I really enjoyed reading The Wolf Den and highly recommended it, I find The House with the Golden Door to be a middling second novel, so I am beginning to wonder if it will even be worth my time to read the entire trilogy.

At the end of The Wolf Den, Amara has been freed from slavery and becomes the concubine of the rather impetuous Rufus. In The House with the Golden Door, it seems that since settling into her own home rented for her by her patron, all of Amara’s intelligence has flown out the window and she allows herself to be ruled by sentimentality.

Amara’s first big mistake is getting into debt with her former pimp Felix, of all people, so that she can free her fellow she-wolves, Victoria and Britannica. Her next big mistake is falling in love with Rufus’s slave, Philos, and having an affair with him. My cynical heart was rather annoyed with the whole Amara-Philos romance. I am just too pragmatic in my old age to believe that love solves all problems. The entire premise of the Wolf Den Trilogy is the highly lucrative sex trade and how women have very little agency over their own lives. But Amara seems to have forgotten this, and how her very freedom is controlled by the whims of Rufus. Instead of focusing on her own survival in the event Rufus abandons her, Amara foolishly takes it upon herself to try to save everyone, and I say foolishly because it inevitably comes back to bite her in the ass, and I do not believe in wasting time on people that cannot be trusted.

Dido’s death at the end of the first novel killed off the female camaraderie that was the best feature of The Wolf Den. Amara was only ever really close with Dido, so I do not understand why Harper would make her character risk the freedom she worked so hard to achieve in order to help Victoria and Britannica, especially when one of them continually shows more loyalty to Amara’s enemy, Felix. Being a freedwoman, Amara finds herself in the position of owning her own slaves, so she can never have that she-wolf camaraderie again. And as a concubine, she is not good enough for women of a higher social class. Her new closest friend is a fellow concubine, Drusilla, who has more sense than Amara and knows when to back away when Amara’s mess gets too big to handle.

Despite my disappointment with The House with the Golden Door, I am going to finish the Wolf Den Trilogy as I am committed now, and besides, the third book apparently deals with the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, so I am curious to see how the demise of Pompeii affects the characters.