suzemo

This is somewhere between a 2 and a 3 for me.

For the good: It's a well written story, and if you read it as historical FICTION (emphasis on the fiction), you won't mind the liberties Moran took with history. She mixed up a few things, took some liberties, added some spice and spit out this story. I can't blame her, she's an author who wants to (theoretically) entertain and make some money, and she did that. In the afterward she claims to have been faithful to history, but that's not true, there are some seriously wild leaps going on, and I would have been happier *without* the afterward trying to claim otherwise.

I also bumped it from a 2 to a 3 because this book makes for a great audiobook and the reader was quite good.

For the bad: It felt too modern. While I don't think that people as a whole change much, even over large swathes of time, this story and some of the attitudes seemed a little too modern for me.

Two of the main characters - Akhenaten and Nefertiti were obnoxious as hell. Akhenaten was a spoiled half-crazy man child that no one reined in and Nefertiti was a damn spoiled brat. I just couldn't buy these two as magnificent leaders of an ancient civilization.

The narrator of the story was Mutny (Mutnodjmet), who (in this story) is the sister of Nefertiti. In fact, the title is a little misleading, because the entire story is Mutny's, it's just that her sister was the center of her family's world, so we heard a lot about her.

I liked that the story covered from Nefertiti's marriage as a girl until her death, it wasn't just a piece of her story.

It was entertaining, so I don't have too many complaints, and I'll go ahead with Moran's Heretic Queen (which I understand to take some wild deviations from known history from Moran's own website.)