Quick Review: Nefertiti

Nefertiti by Michelle Moran

I have discovered something: Archaeologists make really excellent novelists.

Michelle Moran worked in Egypt for several years, inspiring her to write a total of three books about Queen Nefertiti and her family. This book, a stand-alone novel, is told from the perspective of Nefertiti's younger sister, Mutnodjmet, or Mutny, as her family calls her. It begins when Mutny is barely a teenager, and her sister is only fourteen. Their aunt, Queen Tiye, chooses Nefertiti to be the Chief Wife of her son, Amunhotep IV, after his older brother dies (under mysterious circumstances). The hope is that Nefertiti's strong personality will reign in the impulsive young heir, and prevent him from doing harm to the Egyptian empire once he becomes Pharaoh. By placing the ambitious Nefertiti on the throne, she sets into motion the destiny of a family that will forever mark Egyptian history.

This book starts off really slow. I won't tell you how long it took me to read the first portion of the book. Covering a total of about twenty years, the girls early days in the palace are entertaining, but not gripping. Gossip and petty backstabbing get covered up as political intrigue and jealous grabs for power as Nefertiti fights for her place as Amunhotep's favorite against his first wife, Kiya. As Amunhotep takes power, however, and begins to acheive his own goal--first by renaming himself Akhenaten, after the sun disk, Aten, and destroying all of the old temples of Egypt, taxing them into ruin to build a new city in the middle of the desert, Amarna, Mutny and Nefertiti and those around them must walk on egg shells to avoid angering him, meanwhile making secretive moves in the shadows in an attempt to keep enemy nations from invading, to placate angry coutiers and civilians who do not like the sweeping changes being made.

The final third of the book, however, tumbles out in excitement: Mutny's lover, General Nakhtmin, is sent to the Hittite front, a sure death sentence. Suspecting treachery on her sister's part, Mutny leaves the palace, swearing never to return. Unrest grows throughout Egypt and her territories, and it all comes to a tipping point when Akhenaten, believing in a treaty with the Hittite king, invites their nobility right into the heart of Amarna. As the death toll rises, Nefertiti and Mutny must make difficult decisions in the hope of not only saving their own lives, but those of their families and their people.

This book gives a great insight into the customs and lives of people 3500 years ago. It has an engaging story, and once the ball starts rolling it doesn't stop.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 skeins

Buried in Books (and That's the Way I Like It)

I know I said I was scaling back on the writing, but clearly cutting out books is not my intention. This is my upcoming reading list. And that's not even including The Lord of the Rings that's currently sitting by my bed:

Clearly I have enough there to give you at least a book review a week for the next couple of months. Not all of them are books for review; Virals is a Kathy Reichs book that I bought when she was in Beavercreek last year for a signing, and never got around to reading. The books on the 1920s are research for novels that I most certainly am not writing at the moment (I never made any rules about outlining, did I? Or doing character studies, right?), and Pawn of Prophecy is the latest book that Missouri has foisted on me and insisted that I read.

Not shown--a book one of my cousins gave me last summer at our family reunion. I like what I've read by that author previously, but am having trouble getting into Laddie. It's on hold until I finish other things.

At the time of this writing, Missouri is borrowing Mountain Echos by C.E. Murphy; it arrived this morning and since I hijacked her new Karen Chance novel when it arrived, it only seems fair that she get first crack at one of my new books (I can hardly be blamed, really. Fury's Kiss sat unattended in the living room for three whole days and she made no move to read it. A book that good shouldn't be left to gather dust, and once again, Karen Chance did not disappoint).

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some reading to do.

Book Review: The Sugar Maple Chronicles (1-3)

Today I have a quick series review for you.

Normally, I don't like "knit lit" (novels that center around knitting). I know, weird, right? You would think that an avid knitter/designer/writer would love those. But most of the time I find them cliched and depressing. In one book I read, one member of a knitting group was ostracized because the father of another group member tricked her into thinking he was someone much younger, and started dating her while still married, even though the woman in question had no idea the two of them were connected (or that he was married). Other "knit lit" I've read (or tried to read) seems to believe that the only thing to make a happy ending is for every woman to find a man by the end of the book--regardless of the status of the rest of her life, or even if the man is worth it, and still others follow the "rocks fall and everybody dies" school of thought, picking off main characters through various forms of physical and emotional tragedy.

I'm sorry, but that's not what knitting is about, and those are not the kinds of books I like to read.

Enter The Sugar Maple Chronicles.

This series combines yarn, romance, a wee bit of adventure, and fantasy to weave a tale that is both light and engaging, with a dash of humor and a pinch of danger (wow, talk about mixing metaphors...but I digress).

Sugar Maple is a tiny tourist town in northern Vermont. The cafe is run by witches, a family of vampires runs the funeral home, faeries take care of the Inn (where no one EVER stays overnight), and at the Sticks & String yarn shop, your yarn never tangles, your stitches never drop, and you always get gauge, well, things aren't really normal there, either.

Here is the setup, as defined in Book 1, Casting Spells: Chloe Hobbs is the direct descendant of Aerynn, one of the founding members of Sugar Maple, a town intended to protect it's magic-laced denizens. Sheltered from the outside world, Sugar Maple is protected so long as a Hobbs woman walks the earth. But there's a problem: Not only is Chloe magic free (unless one cares to count her self-replenishing basket of roving, handed down from her mother), but she's single. Already in her thirties, the magic protecting the town is starting to wan.

This becomes painfully clear when a tourist is murdered by the lake. Crime-free for centuries, Sugar Maple is ill prepared to deal with the death of a "muggle."

Enter Luke MacKenzie, a cop sent by the state to investigate Suzanne Marsden's murder. Chloe, the defacto mayor of the small town, goes to greet him and get him settled into his temporary position...and sparks fly from the start.

Torn between her duty to the town and True Love, most of Casting Spells is focused on the love story of Luke and Chloe, with some mystery thrown in. The yarn shop is mostly a backdrop, but the story is engaging and one that leaves warm fuzzies in it's wake.

True to form, book 2, Laced with Magic, tests the couple's relationship when Luke's ex wife arrives on the scene, insisting that their dead daughter has been trying to communicate with her. Now not only do Luke and Chloe have the usual quirks of a relationship to work out, but they have to do it with Karen in their midst, dragging up bits of Luke's past that Chloe knew nothing about. And as if that wasn't bad enough, they have to keep the darker aspects of the town away from Karen--even as Chloe's emotional state makes it nearly impossible for her to control her burgeoning powers. The fact that most of the town's people are now questioning her ability to lead--since there are TWO humans staying in town now, when before they'd merely been visitors--is not helping. At. All.

While at first they think Karen has just gone mad from grief, never fully recovering from Seffie's death two years earlier, it quickly becomes clear that someone IS trying to communicate with her--the question is, who?

Book 3, Spun by Sorcery, is not the final book in the series, but it is the last book I've managed to get my hands on (so far). The book opens as Luke and Chloe return from the final battle in Laced with Magic, coming back to town to find...nothing. Absolutely nothing.

As in, the entire town is gone.

The pair are saved from starvation and cold by the wild driving of Chloe's best friend, Janice, from behind the wheel of Chloe's Buick. Loaded down with yarn and one of Chloe's several cats, the car has almost everything for the three of them to get buy for couple of days, and what it lacks is nothing McDonald's can't fix. With no idea where the town--or Janice's family--has gone, the three begin a quest back to the origins of Sugar Maple, and that means going back to Salem, to the place Aerynn first stood up for her people, splitting off from the magical community as a whole to create the haven of Sugar Maple.

In my opinion, the third book moves the slowest of the three, but I still got through both of the later volumes in a week, and one of the inherent problems with quest stories is that there tends to be a lot of "and we're traveling, and we're traveling....still traveling...." going on. At least there's knitting and attacks on the road to keep things interesting.

If you enjoy light fantasy or knit lit, then you'll probably enjoy these books. They're fluff--nothing too profound, but a good, enjoyable, before bed reading kind of series. You can also put it down and pick it back up again--each book does a really great job of reminding the reader of what came before (I actually went a year or two between reading book 1 and book 2).

Book 4, Spells and Stitches, is already out (has been for a while). I'd really prefer to have this series on my Nook, I think, since while it's really good, it's not a favorite and I'd like to save the space. However, since this is a slightly older series, it is actually cheaper to buy the paperbacks used than it is to download the electronic version ($10 for an ebook? Really, Barnes and Noble?).

Overall, I'd give the series 3.5-4 stars out of 5.