Book Review: Egypt the Uprising

Never help a coworker get their groove back. (Unless, of course, you, like, want to be a nice person or whatever.) One full year later, they will be an absolutely terrible "No" person who whispers sweet nothings about how new laptops are technically tax write-offs if you get off your ass and have a book out by the end of the year as you promised yourself.

Absolutely shameful, it really is.

Anyway, as a result of my computer-related foibles over the past week or so, I haven't had much time to do a standard blog post, and no one really wanted to listen to me natter on about writing until I've proven that I can, anyway. What I did do was read. A lot. One of the books I gobbled down:



Egypt: The Uprising (Battle for Maat #1) by Amira Aly

Book Description from Amazon: A debut novel like no other-- touches on the apocalyptic flavors of the times and tells of a history that transcends the past.

Why is the Arab world in turmoil? What instigated the Spring of Freedom?
There is more to the story than meets the eye...
The very fabric of the world is at stake.

And , believe it or not, your fate lies in the hands of one book-loving Egyptian teen with an extraordinary heritage .

Aya is an Egyptian teenage girl trying to mind her own business and take care of her brother. As their country is swept by the tides of a revolution against a tyrant nicknamed the vile pharaoh, Aya tries to stay adrift. But her blood has something different in store for her.

Learning what the Ancients have always known, She joins a battle for truth and freedom-- a battle for Ma'at.

It is not just a story, however, it is a world-within-world, and a fresh tantalizing outlook on the events in our modern world.

This elegant novella is an introduction to a multi-volume series... The Battle for Maat.

My Thoughts: Overall, I enjoyed this. Aya is a smart, proactive heroine, and Aly is skilled at weaving Egyptian mythology into the modern world without clunking the reader over the head or making you feel like a toddler trying to catch up. (A compelling dose of pseudo-science and the immediacy created by setting it against the recent Egyptian revolution helps.) The story is well-paced and, though I guessed that Sheddy wasn't dead, there were several twists which took me well by surprise. There were about a dozen typos, which isn't awful for a novella-length work, and it could have used another go of fine-line editing to clear out some clunky sentences. The author has since put up a copy with the typos corrected, though, and I'm interested in where she goes next.

Buy this author's work on Kindle, B&N, or Kobo.

Note: While my "inexplicable love for ugly things" tag might amuse the hell out of me, I realized that I can't expect people unused to my sense of humor to realize that I'm poking my love of genre rather than their individual works. So, alas, it must be retired.