So I’ll start this off by saying that this is not a bad book. It’s a decent book that bad things have happened to. Not to say it’s awful, but I felt, where there was potential for more information on the plot and relatable characters, there was instead a bit of neediness and self-doubt.
To go over the story quickly, the main character is a 17-year-old girl that lives in New York named Liliana Young. She’s smart (trying to decide which of her choice of colleges to go to), pretty (though typically modest), incredibly rich, and doesn’t date as a rule (which is where I rolled my eyes a little, thinking – “I know this story”). Naturally, she’s a loner and prefers to observe people, rather than getting involved. Her overly controlling parents (you only ever briefly meet the mother – referred to as ‘Mother’ as opposed to ‘Mom’ to enunciate the cold relationship). Since she’s friends with the guards at the MET (frequent visitor, parents giving generous donations, etc), she’s allowed by one of them to go sit in the closed-off Egyptian Exhibit to have some time to go over her college options. Looking at this character right now, I could respect her. Maybe she was a little too perfect, but she seemed to be a decent enough role model.
While she’s in the exhibit, she begins to hear scraping and moaning noises, which turn out to be, after much back-and-forth a re-awakened mummy named Amon. Around here is where the author started to lose me. Instead of this being a great story about the adventure that they have to go on and the struggles, its main underlying theme is how attractive and great Amon is, and Liliana (Now going by ‘Lily because she’s being adventurous and Amon calls her that) being plagued by self-doubt when he doesn’t want to get too involved with her, though he makes it clear he’d like to. The resolute woman with self-respect and enough smarts to look after herself has been replaced with a fawning, insecure girl.
It should also be noted that Amon, since he is not in Egypt, has been slightly sabotaged. He normally rises every 1000 years to perform his mission, and absorbs his energy from his canopic jars (the jars used in old Egyptian mummification that contain the organs) to do what he needs to do. Unfortunately, his jars are nowhere to be seen, so he is forced to bond with Lily and use her life force, until such a time that he is fully formed. This creates a very strong emotional bond, which is used to explain her change of character. He also is gifted with the ability to radiate heat that he absorbs from the Sun, see in the dark and hypnotize people into thinking and doing what he wishes. Not that he’d ever use that on dearest Lily, of course (though of course he has, and she’s unfortunately thankful when he doesn’t…bit too much gratefulness for someone that can control you). In short, he’s the Earthly representative of the Sun God Amun-Ra.
The point of their mission is to get to Egypt, awaken Amon’s two brothers (who turn out to be equally attractive and attracted to Lily), and perform a ceremony to stop the evil Egyptian God Seth from taking over the world and bringing chaos with him. This is where my opening line comes in, and I don’t want to be overly harsh with the story. I just felt that it could have been much more. The scenes that should have been exciting (i.e. – scenes where there was fighting, someone was being held captive, someone may or may not have been slightly mutilated *cough*cough*) were blurred by this almost forced-feeling love story and the two characters thinking about how beautiful the other was. It’s a good idea for a story, I just would like some more of it instead of Twilight.
One thing that did give me proper satisfaction was the ending, my comments will be linked afterwards, as they contain spoilers. All in all, the story itself was a good idea, the characters built well enough, but it took me a little too long to read, since I kept having to stop to roll my eyes. If the author had stepped away from the internal struggle of the characters and focused more on the external one, the story would have been much more interesting and worth reading.
