Rating: ⭐⭐⬜⬜⬜
Title: Neferura
Author: Malayna Evans
Genre: Historical Fiction
Setting: Ancient Egypt
Month Read: January 2024
Book Type: E-Arc
Publication: February 2024
Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark
Pages: 368
*Thank you to NetGalley and to the publisher (Sourcebooks Landmark) for providing me with an E-ARC. All thoughts & opinions are my own.
TRIGGER WARNING-
Murder / Poisoning / Matricide / Infanticide / Abuse / Forced Marriage
"Perhaps you feel you've no choices, or perhaps you believe everything has been decided for you. But when it feels like you have no alternatives, you must create them. If you're creative enough, options are out there. Choices you haven't dared dream might be spun from nothing but air, intellect, and courage. And where there are choices, there is power. For you, there are so many paths you haven't yet considered."
No Spoiler Summary (Goodreads):
For readers of The Wolf Den and Kaikeyi comes the thrilling tale of the forgotten daughter of a legendary Egyptian pharaoh and the path she must take to escape her own dangerous fate. There are many paths to power. They all come with a price. Neferura, princess and high priestess of Kemet, knows her duty is to her people. When your mother is the great Pharaoh, it is hard to forget. But Neferura's unique position at court comes with high stakes for her country, especially when she's forced to serve her vile half-brother, a man determined to stop Neferura's potential rise. Peace, it seems, never lasts for women who wield power in the open. Especially when they cross a vengeful man. When Neferura overhears Thutmose's plot to end her mother's rule, she knows he must be stopped, no matter the cost. The discovery of a mysterious tattooed wisewoman and her shadowy network of spies offers an uneasy alliance. But the wisewoman wields more power than Neferura knew possible -- power with the potential to rival her own. Neferura must decide where her loyalties lie and how much she's willing to sacrifice to protect the people she loves before everything crumbles at the hands of a tyrant.
Review:
The second I saw that this book was being compared to Kaikeyi I knew I had to get it. I, in retrospect, really with I hadn't. This book is not anything like Kaikeyi- the characters are flat, the novel reads like a YA Egyptian mythology novel, and the third act pacts so much into it you get dizzy.
Neferera had a lot of promise, and I really do feel like I was transported to Ancient Egypt. The smells, the colors, the fabrics, everything felt like a movie in my mind. I could feel the hustle and bustle of the market, of the maids in the Palace, of a comb running through my hair. I couldn't wait to get deeper and more immersed into such a beautiful and scary world. However, Neferera herself was so childlike, and flat that I couldn't find it in me to care about her journey. The plot moved at a snails pace, predictably, and then crammed an ending into the third act. At this point I was so far removed from what happened I was wishing I had DNFd a while back and saved myself the time.
I respect the author being an expert in Egyptian mythology, but I feel like this killed the pacing of the book. I also don't get why this was labelled as fantasy? I see this in a lot of other reviews for this novel as well- there really isn't anything in this to make this book a Fantasy novel except for a 'seeing' woman, Hathor, who is sort of like a Holy Woman for the palace.
In the end, I wish we had gotten more of some of the side characters, or dual POV's- I think these could have saved the book a bit more, and I would have been more interested to get away from Neferura because I felt that she was absolutely insufferable.
Recommendation:
Kaikeyi by Vaishnavi Patel (to see what could have been)
Ariadne by Jennifer Saint
The Queen of the Damned by Anne Rice
What the River Knows by Isabel Ibanez
"In the end, everyone’s heart will be weighed."