mixed habitat & densely vegetated hiding places

In the 18th dynasty of Egypt, an enslaved girl named Mara finds herself working as a spy for both sides of a political conflict—those who hope to depose the female pharaoh Hatshepsut and install her brother Thutmose on the throne, and Hatshepsut's loyalists who seek to crush the revolution before it starts. At first Mara is happy to play both sides as long as it means she can win her freedom, but a growing attraction between her and the rebel leader makes her question where her own loyalties lie.

I read this because lirazel was writing it for Yuletide (side note: it is lirazel's birthday! happy birthday!!) and it sounded like a book I would have loved as a kid. I went through a phase of being obsessed with ancient Egypt, and yes, I definitely would have been enthralled by the setting and set pieces here. The cultural and historical details are woven into the story in a way that feels very vivid and natural. I especially loved the fanciful section offering Nut's perspective on the land and its people, as well as the wonderfully tense and scary tomb robbery sequence.

Now, the thing that would have prevented this from being a favorite if I had read it as a child is definitely the romance. Romance plots in fiction were totally opaque to me when I was a kid, which is probably why all my favorite books were focused either on protagonists who were too young to date, or on animals. As an adult... well, romance is still a hard sell for me, but I didn't hate it here, though I predictably spent the whole book wistfully shipping Mara with the Babylonian princess for whom she poses as a translator for plot-related reasons. (Also: Sheftu/Thutmose? They were ~constant companions~ in their youth! And what do they whisper to each other out of Mara's earshot at the end of the book?)

Aside from that, my main takeaway as an adult: Boy does this book do Hatshepsut dirty!!! She is portrayed as a weak ruler who wastes government funds on lavish building projects. Historically, yes, she built a lot of stuff, but her reign is now generally understood to have been a time of prosperity. Okay, maybe in 1953 nobody knew that. But even if so, the way it's framed in this book sure is sexist. Not only is she Beautiful And Evil in that ice queen villainess sort of way, but it is also outright stated by a sympathetic character that Egypt should have A MAN on the throne, and it didn't feel to me like the author was inclined to challenge that. If this is a perspective of its time, is that time the Bronze Age, or the 1950s? Or both?

It's also vaguely claimed that Hatshepsut's regime is bad for The People, but like... in what way? The People we meet seem to be doing okay (except for the ones who are enslaved! but it's not like Thutmose is going to free them when he's king, now, is he?) and Mara specifically contemplates the fact that who is pharaoh really makes no difference to the common people, and I don't think she's wrong. I mean, yeah, she ends up siding with the rebels, but that's because she's in love with their leader and not really for political reasons.

Another thing that puzzled me is that there's a suggestion early on that Mara might have originally come from a well-off family that she no longer remembers, and I was assuming eventually this would pay off in an HMS Pinafore-style reveal that she's actually from the same social class as the guy she likes so it's all fine! But unless I missed something, there appears to be no followup.

All that said, I really thought the story that lirazel wrote was great and added some insightful backstory and character development, so if you happen to know this book, you should definitely read the fic:

At the Sign of the Falcon (4238 words) by Lirazel
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Mara Daughter of the Nile - Eloise Jarvis McGraw
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Mara/Sheftu (Mara Daughter of the Nile)
Characters: Sheftu (Mara Daughter of the Nile), Mara (Mara Daughter of the Nile)
Additional Tags: Missing Scene, Unreliable Narrator, sheftu keeps telling himself he's not falling
Summary: After years of planning, the time drew near—he could taste it in the air, like an approaching storm. And now here he was, waiting for the signal to plunge into the darkness and commit the worst of sins, to stare death in the face in an attempt to keep his dream alive. Were his nerves fraying like an old rope past its usefulness? How else to explain the way this one, infuriating girl kept preying on his mind?

An evening at the Inn of the Falcon.