Quick Take
- Narration: Fiona Hardingham brings Fallon’s ferocity and vulnerability into genuine balance, a performance that honors both the action sequences and the quieter emotional beats.
- Themes: Female ambition in hostile systems, grief and sisterhood, identity forged through combat
- Mood: Propulsive and immersive, with enough historical texture to feel grounded and enough fantasy freedom to feel limitless
- Verdict: A debut series opener that lives up to its comparative marketing, Lesley Livingston has written a Fallon worth spending four books with.
I picked up The Valiant on the recommendation of a colleague who knows I have a weakness for historical fiction with genuine stakes and protagonists who earn their competence rather than inheriting it. I was somewhere in the first hour, listening to Fiona Hardingham voice Fallon’s furious response to her father’s plans for her, when I stopped timing chapters and just listened. That transition, from attentive to absorbed, is the best thing a first installment can achieve.
Lesley Livingston’s premise is immediately legible and immediately appealing: Fallon is a Celtic princess, younger sister to the legendary warrior Sorcha who was killed by Julius Caesar’s forces. She is about to earn her place in her father’s war band when she is captured and sold to an elite gladiatorial training school for women, a school owned by Caesar himself. The man who destroyed her family may be her only path to survival.
Our Take on The Valiant
The synopsis makes this sound like YA historical fiction with a straightforward revenge arc, and it’s more interesting than that. Livingston is genuinely invested in the Ludus Achillea, the training school, as a community, not just a setting. The gladiatrix sisterhood that forms there is where the book’s emotional center lives. Fallon arrives as someone defined by her relationship to her dead sister and leaves having built new relationships with women who are her equals in ferocity and her superiors in arena experience. That social world is richly rendered. The romantic subplot with Cai, the Roman soldier who is Fallon’s sworn enemy and obviously her eventual love interest, is handled with more restraint than the marketing materials suggest, it’s present and effectively deployed, but it doesn’t overwhelm the more interesting story of what Fallon is becoming. One reviewer spent nearly their entire review talking about Fallon specifically, which is the correct priority.
Why Listen to The Valiant
Fiona Hardingham’s narration is one of the audiobook’s strongest assets. She has a particular gift for characters who are simultaneously proud and wounded, Fallon is furious about her capture and terrified of what it means for her sense of self, and Hardingham holds both registers without letting either flatten the other. The arena sequences benefit from her pacing: she accelerates without losing clarity, which is harder than it sounds when the action involves multiple combatants and shifting advantage. The Roman world is rendered with enough specific detail to feel real without becoming a history lecture, and Hardingham navigates the tonal shifts between political maneuvering, training sequences, and emotional confrontations with consistency. At just over ten hours, the listening experience is sustained rather than exhausting.
What to Watch For in The Valiant
Livingston is compared in the book’s own marketing to Sarah J. Maas and Cinda Williams Chima, which positions this toward the more romantically inclined end of YA fantasy. Readers who found Maas’s later work too romance-heavy will be relieved to find that The Valiant is more interested in Fallon’s agency and the gladiatorial world than in her feelings for Cai. That said, at least one reviewer who wanted to love the book lost interest around the midpoint, suggesting the historical fiction structure doesn’t work for everyone regardless of how well it’s executed. The Roman historical material is handled responsibly, Livingston doesn’t gloss the brutality of the gladiatorial system, which some YA readers may find more challenging than they expected. This is not a sanitized version of the arena.
Who Should Listen to The Valiant
This works for readers who loved the premise of recent female-gladiator fiction and want a YA version with genuine historical grounding and a protagonist who earns every inch of her reputation. Fans of Maas’s early Throne of Glass books, before the series became primarily romance, will find the balance here familiar and welcome. Adult readers of historical fiction who don’t mind a YA protagonist will find Livingston’s world-building detailed enough to satisfy. The book is the first in a series, and the ending is clearly constructed to launch rather than conclude, listeners who prefer a more complete story within a single volume should note that this is an opener, not a standalone.
Frequently Asked Questions
How historically accurate is The Valiant’s portrayal of Roman gladiatorial culture?
Livingston takes historical fiction’s traditional liberties while maintaining the broad strokes of Roman gladiatorial culture, including the existence of female gladiators and the patronage system around the training schools. She doesn’t sanitize the brutality of the arena, which gives the historical setting more credibility than lighter treatments of the same period.
Is the romance with Cai central to the plot, or is it secondary to the gladiator storyline?
Secondary, which is a virtue. The Cai subplot is present and effectively handled, but Livingston keeps the training school community and Fallon’s own development as the book’s center of gravity. Readers who want romance as the primary engine should note that this isn’t that, though readers who want it as a significant but not dominant thread will be satisfied.
How does Fiona Hardingham’s narration handle the action sequences?
Very well. She accelerates the pacing in combat sequences without sacrificing clarity about who is doing what to whom, which is the essential challenge of audio action. The tonal range between arena sequences and quieter character moments is also managed with consistency.
Do I need to read all four books in the series to get a complete story from The Valiant?
The first book has enough internal resolution to feel satisfying rather than truncated, though it clearly establishes threads for the subsequent three volumes. Unlike some series openers, it doesn’t end on a raw cliffhanger, Fallon’s immediate arc completes, even as larger questions remain open.
