The House with the Golden Door Is a Nuanced Expansion of The Wolf Den’s World

Her precarious social status is a major throughline throughout the novel, leaving her at the mercy of a patron who slowly reveals himself to be almost as controlling and abusive as Felix, though much less overtly physically violent. Her constant awareness of Rufus’ desires impacts and informs almost every decision Amara makes, from the clothes she wears to the food she eats. (Rufus, you see, likes it when she’s a little skinnier than she should be and looks like a woman who needs rescuing.) Freedom, it turns out, doesn’t necessarily mean you have a lot more choices than you did before.

But many of the choices Amara does make are questionable moral ones—from buying slaves of her own to continuing to lend money (at a healthy rate of interest) to desperate women whose situations aren’t always that much better than her own used to be. But The House with the Golden Door doesn’t judge Amara for her choices, rather simply puts them in a context that allows us to understand why she would see them as necessary, in a specific moment, for her own survival. Watching Amara repeatedly harden herself is difficult and often heartbreaking, as she becomes colder, more calculating, and somehow even less trusting. And while her behavior can often be deeply frustrating, as a reader it’s hard not to feel intense sympathy for her position even as we desperately want her to be better than the circumstances in which she finds herself.

By the end of the novel, Amara is forced to make a final devastating choice, one that a less nuanced storyteller would likely condemn her for. But Harper’s writing is shot through with an innate understanding that for women like Amara, there often simply are no good choices, only the best of a slate of terrible options that allow her to survive long enough to get the chance to do it all over again. But that’s what Amara is, at heart—a survivor, even if it means she leaves a trail of broken promises and betrayals in her wake.

Several of the main characters from The Wolf Den play major roles in this sequel, including Victoria, Britannica, and Felix himself, who seems unable to let go of the whore that got away. Harper writes the fraught relationships between all these characters with great care and emotional nuance, conveying the often confusing and toxic mix of love and jealousy that exists between people after significant status changes and exploring the seemingly constantly shifting power dynamics between them. (The increased role for Britannica here is especially welcome, as the Briton possesses a very specific sort of ferocity that many of the novel’s other characters lack. I would read a spinoff novel about her in a heartbeat, is what I’m saying.)

Much like The Wolf Den, The House with the Golden Door is beautifully written, full of historical detail (most chapters open with a quote from the graffiti that still survives on Pompeii’s walls today) but with a fully contemporary narrative feel that understands the challenges historical women once faced aren’t so very different from the things their modern-day counterparts deal with now.