I actually won this book and I can honestly say I really liked it. This story kept me hooked from the beginning to the end. It had love, adventure, mystery and some wonderful characters. It is the type of epic that you'd expect Hollywood to make a film of in the similar style of Ben Hur or Lawrence of Arabia. ( )

Glad to have read reveiws by others and see that they, to a man, found this book boring, bland and quite, quite confusing. Gave up after trying very hard to find the thread, or even something remotely interesting.

Like Little Bookworm I am trying to broaden my historical horizon both in terms of place and characters but this was not the book to start! The cover is great but belies the content ... do not even bother to pick it up. ( )

Ivor Willoughby’s father has been a non-existent presence in his life. Apart from a couple of weeks when Ivor was a boy, his father has spent the entirety of his life in Arabia, soldiering and having adventures. The Willoughby family have always been warriors, so when Ivor grows to manhood he realizes that he, too, longs to travel to Arabia. He aims primarily to find his father, but when he arrives in Abha he discovers that the people are not as forthcoming as he would have liked. Instead, he hears stories of a woman called Na’ema, and as he searches further wonders just how this warrior woman is tied to his father.

I very rarely outright dislike books that I choose to read these days, but unfortunately this book just did not sit right with me and I did not enjoy reading it. If I hadn’t received it from LibraryThing Early Reviewers, I can guarantee it would have been a DNF. Unfortunately I did feel obliged to review it, and so I trudged onward and managed to get the whole thing read.

At first glance, the book looks very appealing. Lately, my aim in historical fiction and history has been to experience places and stories that are new to me, that I haven’t read twenty times before. Saudi Arabia is most definitely new to me, and I loved the idea of a mysterious warrior woman. Ivor’s search for his father is clearly meant to be very epic, with lots of adventure, or at least that’s how I interpreted the premise.

Unfortunately, the book fails on these levels. The story itself is, frankly, not interesting. There is a great deal of set-up at the beginning, but when Ivor actually gets to Arabia he does very little but listen to other people tell him stories about his father. The book cover promises whispers of Na’ema’s story, but in reality her story is shouted from the rooftops and all he has to do is find her. She’s not particularly mysterious except in one aspect, which I won’t spoil but which was not actually that exciting. I couldn’t help but think the story would have been far more compelling from Ivor’s father Robert’s point of view. All the action happens around him, so why not just tell it from his perspective? The characters would surely have been more fleshed out if the reader had actually met them.

Moreover, I struggled to get along with the actual history of the book. Newton more or less drops us in it and doesn’t really explain the wider context of the story. I felt I would have liked to know which bits were true, if any, and which weren’t; this would have made it more valuable as historical fiction at least. Instead, I just feel confused, like I’ve wasted the time I spent reading it. To make matters worse, the writing isn’t even particularly good, and at times Ivor’s interjections to the reader are clunky and irritating. There is absolutely no suspense and nothing to keep the reader going through the pages of telling.

I had high hopes for The Mistress of Abha, but I was let down. As a result, I regrettably would not recommend this book. ( )

In The Mistress of Abha by William Newton, Ivor Willoughby goes searching for the father he barely knew. A British soldier stationed in Arabia, Ivor met his father, Robert, on only 2 occasions and for only a handful of days in total, but Robert was a legend in their household and beyond. Ivor is determined, from a very young age, to go to Arabia for himself and see the land that so enthralled his father. His father’s legend, the story of Ullobi, is not at all what he imagined. It’s much, much more.

The Mistress of Abha is a dense story, full of detail and description — everything from the type of car Robert Willoughby drove when he was seducing the young ladies of Oxfordshire to the sounds and smells of the Arabian markets that Ivor explores, looking for someone with the information he seeks. If you’re someone who likes to get right to the heart of the story, get right to the action, pass this by; you’ll just be frustrated. The first third of the book is spent setting up Ivor’s trip to Arabia: his father’s courtship of his mother, his childhood, his education. Then the story changes, as Ivor meets Etza, a former slave who may hold the key to his father’s whereabouts.

Read my full review here. ( )

I don't remember why I requested The Mistress of Abha from Early Reviewers; likely I was just picking everything that sounded remotely interesting. Because, to be honest, I'm not a great fan of contemporary historical fiction and have no particular interest in the history of the Arabian peninsula. However, it arrived, and now I've finally read it.

Ivor Willoughby, the scion of an old British military family, heads to Arabia in the 1920s to find the father he saw only once a decade or so before. He wanders around the region seeking people who can tell him about his father, along the way learning a great deal about the family of his father's best friend, Tabarhla the Amir of Abha--particularly his second wife, the sheikha Na'ema.

All this plays rather like a novel of the period of his Edwardian father's adventures (albeit slightly more explicit at times than those I've read), but without anything particularly important or exciting occurring. I guessed the only "revelation" of the novel's ending long before, and the characters tend very much towards the stereotypical. The narrator's voice is practically nonexistent, and his reactions are very slow. I actually would have preferred the story without the framing device of the son and his journeys, if that meant that the extra time was devoted to making the main characters more than traditional figures--the over-sexed sheikh, the doughty (and also over-sexed) British adventurer, the captive princess (two of them!), the devoted slave, the adoring concubine, and so on. In the end, the only thing I can say I really appreciated was the novel's historical facts (summarized in an afterword) and vivid depictions of the landscape. But, of course, I'm not the ideal audience.