Customer Reviews
enjoyable read - By: A. Vidoret, 17 Sep 2008 
I bought the bookin the airport for an easy readin the plane.
I was transported to a beautiful world that makes you want for more.
This book tickles your curiousity & you find yourself going on the internet to see was really happened. You start caring for the characters so much that you seek confirmationin history.
I would advise you to read it & enjoy a mental holidayin Egypt...
Exotic, delicious and extremely compelling - By: E. Potten, 16 Sep 2008 
This is a wonderful & powerful novel about one of the most powerful royal couplesin Ancient Egypt. The story opensin the royal city of Thebes, where Pharoah & his family & courtiers arein mourning for the recently deceased Crown Prince Tuthmosis. Now his younger brother Amunhotep is the heir to the throne & must choose a Chief Wife as his queen. His mother, Queen Tiye, chooses her feisty niece Nefertiti,in the hope that she will be strong enough to reinin his arrogance & destructive tendencies & shape him into a good ruler.
The story is narrated by Nefertiti's quiet younger half-sister Mutnodjmet, who helps her sister to ready herself to travel to Thebes, & experiences for herself the delights of the royal palace & the luxury that comes with being the sister of the king's Chief Wife. But it soon becomes clear that Nefertiti is being corrupted by the power & ambition of her husband, & rather than keeping himin check she only encourages him, supporting him as he goes against thousands of years of Egyptian tradition, elevating a new God above the old protectors of Egypt, rejecting his first wife Kiya, destroying the temples & building the new royal city of Amarna to glorify Aten & turn the royal couple into deities. Families are destroyed, corruption runs rife & the outskirts of Egypt are threatened by invasion, but Pharaoh is too busyin his vain pursuits to notice anything outside of his own palace. Nefertiti's beauty & charisma enchant her people & her husband alike, but her selfish nature leads to a rift between the two sisters that will tear them apart & echo throughout Egypt. Ultimately, the inevitable happens, & despite her family's desperate attempts to avert crisis, Mutnodjmet can only watchin horror as the great empire of Akhenaten & Nefertiti self-destructsin a gripping & heartbreaking climax as Egypt fights back to reclaim its history.
This is a brilliant piece of storytelling. It is brilliantly researched, & although some fictional liberties have been taken (acknowledged openly by the author at the end of the book) it is so well groundedin fact that it hardly matters. The family tree at the start of the book was particularly usefulin keeping track of family connections & grasping difficult names. Moran has entwined all that is known about the royal court of the Heretic King, as well as historical theory & intelligent guesswork, to create a complex & riveting novel full of delicious detail that brings the exotic Ancient Egyptian cities, palaces & domestic households to life. It is a whirlwind journey through the reign of perhaps the most famous Egyptian Queen of all time, spiralling along with her ambition until the sudden, violent & extremely moving collapse of the empire which shatters the reader even as it shatters Amarna. I savoured every moment of it - I was transported away from the British autumn into the warm, spiced Egyptian sunshine, cried bitterly all the way through the ending, & finished the book feeling slightly shell-shocked & more than a little sad that it had ended - always the mark of a brilliant novel.
I look forward to reading Moran's next novel, 'The Heretic Queen', this time about Nefertiti's niece, Mutnodjmet's daughter Nefertari, who married Ramses II & continued the family's connection to the royal throne...
An Iconic Queen forever fascinating - a powerful novel of one of the most dramatic times of ancient Egypt - By: Klaus Meyer, 30 Jun 2008 Having recently seen the famous bust of Nefertiti, part of the Ägyptisches Museum Berlin collection & currently on displayin the Altes Museum my interestin the most famous Queen re-emerged. I could not resist buying this novel. And what a powerful novel that is.
Once you start reading it is very hard to put this book down. It is well written, rich with details & not only Nefertiti but a whole area of Egyptian history becomes alive, an area of a religious revolution. Palace intrigues, struggles for power & happiness, religious fights & domination capture the reader instantly. The story is told by Mutnodjmet, the younger half-sister of Nefertiti. Yes, it is a bit like "The Other Boleyn Sister"in this respect, but otherwise both books are only comparable as they intrigue readers from page one.
Whilein reality much is unknown about the descent & life of Nefertiti, Michelle Moran places Nefertiti & her familyin a plausible way. I like especially that she does not creates Nefertiti & Akhenaton as the great romantic couple, but shows the Queen as a beautiful, but power-hungry, manipulative woman & arrogantly blind to the troubles arising. This is the arrogance of the powerful which ever so often is the cause for their downfall . Nefertiti is not the one you like, but still one finds her fascinating. Pharaoh himself shows all the signs of a religious fanatic, dangerous then as today.
Allin all this is a book you should not miss. I enjoyed every page of it.
The Content was as Good as the Cover - By: J. Chippindale, 16 May 2008 Michelle Moran was bornin California. Michelle published her first historical fiction novel, Jezebel while she was still at University. She has travelled around the world - including to Israel, where she participatedin an archaeological (just the sort of thing I would have loved to have donein my younger days), dig that inspired her to begin writing historical fiction. She livesin Southern California.
I had not read the author before & broke my own golden rule, never to be seduced by the cover of a book. This one is so beautifully done that I was drawn like the proverbial moth to the flame. Fortunately the content of the book also appealed to me as I am a lover of all things Ancient Egyptian.
The book follows the lives of two sisters. Mutny, a shy young girl who is whisked with her whole family into the limelight of a palacein Thebes, where the shy & unassuming girl finds herselfin rooms more beautiful & ornate than she could ever have imagined existed. All this transpires because her sister Nefertiti marries the Crown prince of Egypt.
This is not Mutny's world & she soon becomes disillusioned with it & also with the behaviour of her willful sister Nefertiti who has people bowing & scraping to her simply because of her radiant beauty. In fact her beauty alone entrances anyone she meets, except her sister Mutny. Soon it is only Mutny alone who is not bewitched by Nefertiti's beauty.
As Nefertiti & her husband set out making a legacy for themselves, even the army is used to build a cityin their name. While all this happening Egypt's neighbours begin to gather & encroach on Egypt's borders. Not until it is almost too late does Nefertiti act to try to save her nation.
Hated it - By: David Mawson, 12 May 2008 
Sorry, but I couldn't make it past page 70. They say never let the facts getin the way of a good story. The problem with this book is that the quality of the prose is not good enough to paper over the cracks. The author has a horde of spectators witnessing the burial of a royal prince (don't think so); she has Karnak on the wrong side of the river to everywhere else, & she even refers to Thebes as Luxor at one point. I like my historical fiction to be better researched.
