SOURCE: "Roman Scandals," in The New York Times Book Review, October 6, 1991, p. 13.

Below, Jennings offers an unfavorable review of The Grass Crown, finding fault with the novel's slow development and excessive incorporation of historical minutiae.

In The Grass Crown, Colleen McCullough continues the work she began with The First Man in Rome, a history of the Roman Republic and its surrounding world of the first century B.C. There is really no need for this volume's 74-page glossary and other endpaper flauntings of Serious Scholarship. The author, best known for The Thorn Birds, all too obviously did voluminous research, because every last fact and detail she unearthed seems to be included here, not a jot or title discarded as superfluous, irrelevant or reader-numbing. Observe:

"Drusus's house was right on the corner of the Germalus of the Palatine where the Clivus Victoriae turned at right angles to run along...