Top Ten Tuesday: Book I Liked with Asexual character.

 

I like a book with a hermaphrodite character. 

The book is available at Amazon only in paperback. I read if after his book Aztec. I discovered that Gary Jennings has a way of writing a scene that if etched by acid onto your memory. Every book I've read of his has done this.

Raptor is set during the time of Theodoric the Great (Dietrich in Gothic) who overthrew the last Roman emperor, Romulus Agustulus, and dates the fall of the Western Empire and the beginning of the dark ages around 465AD.

Raptor is a hermaphrodite and is capable of passing as either woman or man, even sexually. Throughout the book he one or the other sometimes both. He becomes an assassin. 

One scene burned into my memory is at the beginning where he's an orphan at a monastery and the monk in charge of the kitchen where Raptor is sent to work thinks he's a girl and uses him as such. It isn't until later Raptor knows he's both as he/she was raised as a girl.

As an assassin he's given the job of killing one of Theodoric's rivals in Ravenna. Most of the time he is in male dress and only as a woman when stealth is needed.

 He dresses as a prostitute and uses a thin wire under his dress to push up what breasts he has. Once with the rival he straightens the wire and kills him with it, then leaves and is gone before the body is discovered. There are other assassinations and battles, but this one was the most memorable.

 One thing Gary Jennings does is research and describe the historical setting in great detail. This made it especially interesting as it's such a black hole of history and is very enlightening in an entertaining way.

It is the only book I've read with this type of character. There are very few novels written in this time period. Tony Roberts has a couple of Casca books in the time period, that I've read since.