★★★☆☆ Egyptian-American Cinderella

Mara, Daughter of the Nile

Eloise Jarvis McGraw

** spoiler alert **

Good news first: Mara, Daughter of the Nile is a fun, light-hearted romance/spy novel with an appealing heroine -- that would be the slave-girl Mara named in the title. Now for the bad news: it is utterly conventional. The love story is one you have read dozens of time if you read romance novels: rich and powerful man falls in love with plucky poor girl. She, of course, loves him for himself, not his money or power, and in the end they marry and live happily ever after. Examples that come to my mind are Daddy Longlegs, Jane Eyre, and the film Pretty Woman (although I hasten to clarify that Mara's profession is not that of Vivian Ward -- everything here is relentlessly PG-13). I could keep listing such novels forever -- you have probably thought of a few more even while reading the previous very long sentence. It's a very old story and not in itself a bad one -- it's Cinderella.

This particular one is set in ancient Egypt, 1458 BC. We can date it precisely because the story ends with the death of Pharoah Hatshepsut. Now, if Mara, Daughter of the Nile produced special insight into what life was like in ancient Egypt, that would be sufficient to make this novel worth reading. But to my mind Mara seems in personality and manner to be a as normal an American teenage girl as ever appeared in a romance novel.

You may argue that "Human nature doesn't change!", but I'm not buying it. Human nature DOES change! You reader, are different from me, partly because you are different in nature, and partly because you have had different experiences. I have no doubt that a girl who has spent all her 17 years as a slave in ancient Egypt would feel and think about many things differently from the way I do. Among those things would be romances with powerful men.

I also note that the villain of the book, Hatshepsut, is probably not treated fairly. At least according to Wikipedia (which of course is not an authoritative source) Hatshepsut seems not to have been bad, as Egyptian Pharaohs go. This makes me suspect that as a portrait of Egyptian history, Mara, Daughter of the Nile may be misleading.

So, although it is a fun romance novel, I don't feel that Mara, Daughter of the Nile conveys much insight into how ancient Egypt felt to those who lived along the Nile thousands of years ago. Soldier of Sidon and The Eye of Horus are much better in this regard. Still, if you want a light-hearted fun romance, Mara, Daughter of the Nile is not bad.

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