Mara, Daughter of the Nile by Eloise Jarvis McGraw

I highly, highly recommend it. It follows Mara, a young Egyptian slave 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. :)

I also very much enjoyed your blogs about publicity a few weeks ago on Nathan’s blog. I copied and pasted them into my file on publicity ideas to refer to when I start my own marketing campaign next year for my new book with Scholastic. So THANK YOU!!! And Happy New Year!

Okay, maybe a B+. And maybe that won’t be for a while. But as G-d is my witness I will be on the honor roll some day….

I hope you have a happy holiday season!

I’m a stickler for detail and accuracy and my crit group tells me I spend too much time researching. I don’t think so! But even within historian and Egyptologist circles, there is dissent and varied opinion.

One of the best novelists on ancient Egypt is Pauline Gedge. Her books will blow you away! You haven’t *done* Egypt until you’ve read her. The details, the characterizations, the gripping storylines, wowza.

XandraG: Thank you so much for the recommendation of Jacq’s books — I love the Egyptian setting, which is part of what drew me to the Moran books. Let me reiterate, too, that I really appreciated her up front attitude toward admitting that she changed some of the facts. While I had a bit of a sense that I could find online many of the sources she used for her book, and while I argued with myself as to whether I should be disappointed or reassured by this, I felt Moran took the history seriously, even if there were places where what I knew to be true didn’t jibe with Moran’s portrayal (stuff outside the historical notes).

DS: It was interesting, because one of the things I wondered at in Moran’s book was the way she indicated that once Seti died that Queen Tye would retire somewhere quietly. It is my understanding that the mother queen would be more active in the political affairs of the kingdom; although perhaps that wasn’t true for all queens, or specifically for Tye. But you’re right that Iset (as Moran calls her) was the mother of the RL heir to the Egyptian throne, and I think it was Ramesses 13th son, but I could be wrong about that.

Margaret: As I said in my comment to Kimber An, it wasn’t the historical changes that didn’t work for me (i.e. the made up stuff); it was the way those worked in the novel. But I agree with you that one of the pleasures of historical fiction is seeing how others interpret different historical eras and characters. For me, at least, history is as much a character in historical fiction as any of the human characters in the text.

One thing is that Ramesses II’s mother was not his father’s Great Royal Wife. Unless Ramesses was very, very popular one would think something as important as the choice of his chief wife would be based on a conservative choice rather than emotion alone. The Egyptians were good at propoganda though and after his father’s death Ramesses II invented this history that made him not just his earthly father’s son, but also the son of a god– hey, if it worked for Hatshepsut!

It gets even more interesting when one remembers that Nefertari did not give birth to the heir. Ramesses outlived a number of his children– 12 is one number I’ve seen mentioned– including his and Nefertari’s first son– not twins (I groan at the number of twins produced in romance novels). The ultimate successor was the son of Isetnofret, who I assume was the rival here. But Ramesses and Isetnofret had a number of children together so he couldn’t have been particularly put off by her.

My only exception to this in the case of ancient Egypt is if something is deliberately “pulpy” a la “The Mummy” (which had enough beefcake in it to forgive anything) or Stargate (which takes an essentially SF premise and coats it in a coincidentally ancient Egyptian dressing, even though it makes many of my scholarly friends headdesk over the whole “pyramids and aliens” thing).

If you want a more quasi-realistic portrayal, check out Christian Jacq’s four-book series. It’s centered on Rameses, but Nefertari plays a central role, and Jacq’s a scholar in the field, so he’s got that “feel” for the reality of an ancient Egyptian worldview down. I say “quasi-realistic” because of the presence of fantasy elements in the novels and some fictionalizations to serve the story, however, these elements fit so well into the story, that if you are familiar with the period, you have to remind yourself that you’re reading fiction.

And thanks for the review of this–I’ve been wondering about it, and I think I’ll pick it up and read it as a YA novel–as your review suggests, if that’s the voice it bears, then maybe it’s best read with YA fic in expectation.