Mara, Daughter of the Nile by Eloise Jarvis McGraw

I highly, highly recommend it. It follows Mara, a young Egyptian girl who takes up a dangerous job as a double spy between two different masters: Queen Hatshepsut and the younger brother she’s trying to control, Thutmose.

It’s an older book and it’s slanted more towards young adult, but it’s really wonderful. :)

Nice to meet another Claremont Colleges alum! I do know Richard Preston also went to Pomona, and if there’s anyone on this forum who would like a bit of a departure from romance, his nonfiction books The Hot Zone and The Demon in the Freezer will keep you up ALL night.

I doubt the incest in Gedge’s book will bother me, since, well, how can you avoid it?

I also wanted to point out that Michelle Moran is a graduate of Pomona College and Claremont Graduate University, a very small six-institution system that is known for another historical fiction author of note, Judith Merkle Riley (she teaches at one of my alma maters, Claremont McKenna College). I wonder if there are other historical fiction authors who have come out of the Claremont Colleges, considering how tiny they are, lol.

And to Poppin: Yes, the age discrepancy appears in the hardcover but not the paperback. It was a frustrating result of cuts and rearrangements to the timeline of the novel. As Janet points out, the book is pretty dense at 500 pages, and publishers don't like to go much longer than that for debut authors (although some will take the chance), so I had to cut about a hundred pages from the book. It's pretty mortifying when something so obvious slips by and ends up in the published version, but I've gone to great lengths to make sure there's no mistakes like that in The Heretic Queen!

That sucks that they did that. It took me out of the book a few times and it was really frustrating. I can’t even imagine how you must have felt. Thanks for clearing that up for me! I think I’ll read your paperbacks from now on. :)

Michelle, do you plan on doing more books on Egyptian women after these two?

Hi Jill! Actually, the answer is yes and no. My third novel, which will be coming out in the summer of 2009, is Cleopatra’s Daughter (which I just finished two days ago – woo hoo!!!). Although Kleopatra Selene was a princess of Egypt, her mother, the famous Kleopatra VII, was Greek. Selene had an amazing life story. After her mother committed suicide, she and her twin brother Alexander were taken from Egypt and paraded through the streets of Rome in Augustus’s military Triumph. The life she led after that is pretty jaw dropping (I explain a little about it here).

Aside from Nefertari (who had a pretty unbelievable life herself) Selene’s story has been my favorite to both research and write!

I’ll definitely pick this one up and I’ll let you know what I think.

(And Popin, if it’s like The Other Boleyn Girl, I’m sold. Lol. I loved that book.)

I’m honestly really excited about The Heretic Queen. Nefertari is rarely written about. Michelle, do you plan on doing more books on Egyptian women after these two?

Thank you so much for taking the time to review Nefertiti (and hi Kimber… nice to see you here!). You make some great points about the pros and cons of not choosing Nefertiti to tell the story. Ultimately, I decided to write the novel from perspective of Nefertiti's younger sister, Mutny, because the historical Nefertiti didn’t seem as though she would have been a trustworthy narrator. Nefertiti was incredibly ambitious, and probably would not have had trouble lying or flattering her way to power. The historical Mutny, by contrast, didn't seem to possess Nefertiti's ambition, and so I felt that she made a much more credible narrator. With two such startlingly different sisters, however, there was bound to be conflict, and from that conflict comes what I hope is a good tale. You are also absolutely right when you wrote:

Mutny is both assumed to be Nefertiti's sister and she is known to have married someone other than her husband in the novel. That was the one place where it felt like Moran made a decision to create a happy relationship (and a more explicit romantic strain to the novel) rather than something that, given the other character, would not have been so romantic.

I explain more about this decision on the QA page of my website. And I really did want a happy ending for Mutny, or if not a happy ending, at least a happy start. The man she goes on to marry forced her into marriage much later in her life (a subject I deal with in the second book), and given the timeline, it seemed not only plausible, but likely to me, that she would have had a previous relationship before this unhappy union.

And to Poppin: Yes, the age discrepancy appears in the hardcover but not the paperback. It was a frustrating result of cuts and rearrangements to the timeline of the novel. As Janet points out, the book is pretty dense at 500 pages, and publishers don’t like to go much longer than that for debut authors (although some will take the chance), so I had to cut about a hundred pages from the book. It’s pretty mortifying when something so obvious slips by and ends up in the published version, but I’ve gone to great lengths to make sure there’s no mistakes like that in The Heretic Queen!

I've loved Mutnodjme ever since I read Pauline Gedge's wonderful The Twelfth Transforming. She's such an obscure figure in history (but with the right connections at that time) that she seems like the perfect narrator.

I haven’t read Gedge’s book, but I’m very interested now in doing so. I’d be interested in hearing your opinion on Nefertiti after you’ve read it, since you have more acquaintance with Mutnodjmet than I do. I don’t know if it was her position that made her narration feel unbalanced to me, or just the way Moran draws the characterizations. So much depends on the interpretive work of the author, after all.

Am I the only one who immediately thought of Steve Martin's song on SNL?

NO! I have been mentally hearing that song for days now, lol, especially this part:

(King Tut) How'd you get so funky?
(funky Tut) Did you do the monkey?
Born in Arizona,
Moved to Babylonia (king Tut).

I can even see Martin on stage in his white suit with that headdress. Hysterical.

As for Tut, having been quite young when his tomb first made the rounds in America, I have an impression of the Boy King that is stubbornly contrary to history, and I doubt that impression will ever be changed,

Am I the only one who immediately thought of Steve Martin’s song on SNL?

King Tut (King Tut)
Now when he was a young man,
He never thought he'd see
People stand in line to see the boy king.

(King Tut) How'd you get so funky?
(funky Tut) Did you do the monkey?
Born in Arizona,
Moved to Babylonia (king Tut).

(king Tut) Now, if I'd known
they'd line up just to see him,
I'd taken all my money
And bought me a museum. (king Tut)

Buried with a donkey (funky Tut)
He's my favorite honkey!
Born in Arizona,
Moved to Babylonia (king Tut)

(Tut, Tut) Dancin' by the Nile, (Disco Tut, Tut)
The ladies love his style, (boss Tut, Tut)
Rockin' for a mile (rockin' Tut, Tut)
He ate a crocodile.

He gave his life for tourism.
Golden idol!
He's an Egyptian.

Now, when I die,
now don't think I'm a nut,
don't want no fancy funeral,
Just one like ole king Tut. (king Tut)

He coulda won a Grammy, (king Tut)
Buried in his Jammies, (king Tut)
Born in Arizona, moved to Babylonia,
He was born in Arizona, got a condo made of stone-a,
King Tut!

I’ve loved Mutnodjme ever since I read Pauline Gedge’s wonderful The Twelfth Transforming. She’s such an obscure figure in history (but with the right connections at that time) that she seems like the perfect narrator.

I believe the general consensus now is that Tut was the son of Kiya (who shows up in records for a short period of time and then disappears, so it’s assumed she died abruptly) and the son of Akhenaten or Smenkhare. So the research sounds correct from my (admittedly poor) knowledge of the subject.

I admit I have a general distaste for Nefertiti as a historical figure, but Mutnodjme will make me pick this one up…and I’m really looking forward to the Nefertari book later this year.

My issue with Nefertiti’s characterization as a powerful woman comes in part from what you mention in your comment — that women in Egypt were, in fact, capable of becoming pharaohs, that they were capable of holding that kind of power. The reason that Nefertiti’s relationship to the most powerful men in her life was an issue for me had to do with the fact that with Mutny narrating we are getting a necessarily limited perspective. And sometimes that perspective does not, IMO, fully express the *complexity* of Nefertiti’s power. Often she comes across to me as petulant, selfish, cruel, petty, and completely self-absorbed, without — for me, at least — enough nuance to balance those aspects of her character with a more positive and meaningfully powerful view.

DS: I’m not invested in any particular story around Nefertiti, although I was happy that Moran did, IMO, try to fit her book into both the known facts and the speculative theories around some of the characters. I find the question of Mutny’s relationship with Nefertiti to be the most interesting aspect of the historical speculation, especially since Mutny is both assumed to be Nefertiti’s sister and she is known to have married someone other than her husband in the novel. That was the one place where it felt like Moran made a decision to create a happy relationship (and a more explicit romantic strain to the novel) rather than something that, given the other character, would not have been so romantic. At 500 pages, the book clocked in at pretty dense, although I felt that some aspects could have been edited down and others expanded. Other readers likely feel differently about that, though.

As for Tut, having been quite young when his tomb first made the rounds in America, I have an impression of the Boy King that is stubbornly contrary to history, and I doubt that impression will ever be changed, lol, no matter how illogical it is. I don’t, btw, know how accurate Moran’s rendering of Tut is (she has him born to Kiya, who dies right after his birth, and adopted by Mutny and her husband General Nakhtmin), although I understand how that works within the context of the narrative.

And this has nothing to do with the book but I was severely disenchanted with the finding that Tutankhamum probably had a 32 inch chest, a 29 inch waist and 43 inch hips– based on measurements of his clothes found in the tomb.

The thing to remember when reading NEFERTITI is that it is NOT Historical Romance. It is regular Historical Fiction. While Historical Romance is frequently softened up to appeal to contemporary readers, especially in regard to the role of women, regular Historical Fiction isn’t, or at least nowhere near as much. The fact is Nefertiti’s power did flow from her marriage to Akenaten. She would have been a minor noble or stuck in someone’s harem with little to no power at all if she had not married Akenaten. In fact, Ancient Egypt was the most advanced nation on Earth when it came to women’s rights, as far as I know. Nevertheless, even a queen’s power still came about because of a husband (Nefertiti may have ruled as pharoah after her husband’s death for a while) or a son or a minor brother. One of the things I really enjoyed about this novel was that Michelle never watered down Historical accuracy to appeal to contemporary readers. Rather, she appeals to contemporary readers by conveying universal human truths which stand the test of time, like the love for a sister through all adversity. If I did give grades at my book review site, NEFERTITI would have gotten an A+.