Delighted at first to be away from modern America, she quickly begins to realize that her new world is as complicated as her old one. Violence, dirt, and pain are everywhere -- and yet many of the people she comes to know are as happy as those she knew in twentieth-century Los Angeles. Slavery is commonplace, gladiators kill for sport, and drunkenness is taken for granted -- but everyday people somehow manage to face life with humor and goodwill.

No quitter, Nicole manages to adapt to her new life despite endless worry about the fate of her children "back" in the twentieth century. Then plague sweeps through Carnuntum, followed by brutal war. Amid pain and loss on a level she had never imagined, Nicole finds reserves of strength she had never known.

In the great tradition of classics like Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Household Gods is more than a time-travel adventure: It is a tale of a woman's strength and self-discovery, and of the real differences -- and similarities -- between life in our era and days gone by.