A review by andipants
Crocodile on the Sandbank by Elizabeth Peters
3.0
This was an enjoyable adventure/mystery (with one fairly major caveat), and I definitely liked Amelia as a main character. I'm not sure why exactly she appealed to me, when other badass lady-types in historical novels so often don't - I think the appeal here is that it doesn't appear to be trying super hard to be historically believable, at least in terms of social issues. A lot of times, it seems like if you get hung up on that aspect of believability, you end up over-explaining everything, and the rest of the story suffers. Here, all issues of social class, of the propriety of a lady traveling alone, etc are just waved aside as being no match for Amelia's larger-than-life personality. And larger-than-life she is; she is absolutely over the top and I love it.
I also really liked the creepy mystery elements (even if it did veer a little Scooby-doo-esque, especially towards the end), and especially the setting. All the ancient Egyptian stuff was a fascinating backdrop. However, and here comes the caveat, this story was chock full of totally overt colonialist racism. And I mean, it's set in Victorian-era colonial Egypt; the ideas would probably have been sadly true-to-life at the time, but it's pretty de rigeur for modern treatments to point that out and interrogate it in some way, and this book absolutely does not. (To be fair, it was published over 40 years ago, so I wasn't shocked that it didn't, but still, it could have.)
So overall, this was a light, fun adventure romp with a delightfully irascible protagonist, and I'll probably look for more in the series, but I definitely wouldn't recommend it without that caveat.
I also really liked the creepy mystery elements (even if it did veer a little Scooby-doo-esque, especially towards the end), and especially the setting. All the ancient Egyptian stuff was a fascinating backdrop. However, and here comes the caveat, this story was chock full of totally overt colonialist racism. And I mean, it's set in Victorian-era colonial Egypt; the ideas would probably have been sadly true-to-life at the time, but it's pretty de rigeur for modern treatments to point that out and interrogate it in some way, and this book absolutely does not. (To be fair, it was published over 40 years ago, so I wasn't shocked that it didn't, but still, it could have.)
So overall, this was a light, fun adventure romp with a delightfully irascible protagonist, and I'll probably look for more in the series, but I definitely wouldn't recommend it without that caveat.