Ramona Wheeler

It's interesting. The writing was dry and overly-descriptive in parts, but the world she built was so different from our own that I suspect the level of detail was sometimes unavoidable. The characters were not bad, and the plot was interesting.

I have two major quibbles:

1. The characters talk a lot about the gender equality of the Egyptian empire, but it doesn't show much in the charaters: all of the spies and soldiers were male. Generals, scientists, explorers, priests, all men. Women were princesses and prostitutes, largely.

2. The relationships at the end were totally out of place.

I'd recommend it as a library read.… (altro)

Alas, does not live up to the sprightly promise of the premise. Setting it aside after about 60 pages. The world is delivered with lots of rich detail and description, which slows things down, but my biggest problem was that it didn't flow well for me, often being circuitous and repetitive. When the action did happen, it seemed strangely distant. I did really like the premise, and found it more interesting and believable than a lot of alt-history ("what if Rome never fell" is a difficult one to wrangle out of history; "what if Rome and Egypt merged and ameliorated each others' faults" is more doable, for my money). I was looking forward to seeing an Incan empire that didn't get scuttled just as it was hitting its stride. But I'm just not enjoying reading this.… (altro)