The Pharaoh’s Daughter
The Pharaoh’s Daughter
I actually read this book a year ago. And I’ve started to write a review of it a couple different times, but then I fell on the blog-o-sphere and didn’t ever post it. But it was a really good and deserves a good review. The following is something I wrote a while ago.
This book. This book is just what I want in historical and biblical fiction. It takes the building blocks of a well-known Bible Story and builds around it without changing the original story. There wasn’t a moment where I felt like Mesu Andrews crossed a line. You can tell that she has great respect for the source material.
I’m getting ahead of myself a bit. I’m just so excited about this book!
The Pharaoh’s Daughter is all about Moses’ Egyptian mother, and her journey to drawing a baby from the Nile and what the implications are for such a save. It brings up some excellent points about the culture at the time and how dangerous it was for her to save a baby from the Nile—a baby Pharaoh commanded to be killed.
I want to break this review into 3 parts—my reading experience, the story/plot, and the writing itself.
This book took me several months to read. But that was my fault. I got out of my reading groove (and my blogging groove!). I stopped reading over my lunch break and it made a big difference in my volume of reading.
I will say that I knew a third of the way into the book that I was going to want a sequel—I was going to want to stay in the story. (Good news! There’s a sequel! I found on a fluke at Barnes and Noble and I bought it.)
Then I put it down for a while. A good while. I picked it back up again when I got my hair done several weeks later.
A week after that, I picked it up again before bed without a fifth of it left. I figured I would fall asleep reading… you better believe I finished the book before I could fall asleep—at 2:00am.
It was so good. So good.
Which brings me to the plot. The main character is Moses’ Egyptian mother. I’m having a hard time deciding what to call her because her name changes a lot…she’s called Amira for most of the book—and it’s the easiest to spell—so we’ll go with Amira.
Amira’s whole life is centered around death. When we first meet her, she is witnessing her mother’s death in childbirth. Not only that, but she has been named to trick Anubis (the god of death) into taking her life instead of her sister/queen.
She gets adopted after her father, Pharaoh, dies and her name changes. She grows up terrified of death. Terrified of childbirth.
Her adopted father marries her off to an Egyptian landowner/warrior. And her name changes again—to Amira, which I think is actually a title.
At this point in her life, we see how scared and desperate she is. She wants to have a child for her husband, but she doesn’t want to have a child because she is crippled with fear of her mother’s fate.
Her husband goes off to war and she finds a baby in a basket in the bulrushes. There’s a lot of Egyptian political intrigue that is super interesting—but I don’t want to pull it all apart—you need to read the book! This is about as far as I can go without getting too spoiler-y.
The rest of the book details how she raised this little Hebrew boy and how she navigated the tense politics in Egypt.
I’ve already raved about what I love about this book—Andrew’s ability to marry fiction with history. I also love how she created these major themes in Amira’s life. Her fear of death is all encompassing until she’s shown how that there is hope.
I feel like I’ve barely tapped the surface of this book, but this is a hard one to discuss without spoiling things!
If you are interested in historical and biblical fiction, you need to add this book to your list. And once you finish it, let me know and we can discuss!
I got this book in 2016, it was part of my April Book Haul. If you want to see some other books I got then, here's the post about the book haul!
