What the River Knows

Flauschbuch reviewed What the River Knows by Isabel Ibañez (Secrets of the Nile, #1)

Cozy adventure until it isn't

4 stars

A fast-paced, not very deep adventure novel with some cute enemy to lovers romance on top. There were slightly too many twists in it to feel believeable to me and some of them felt a bit forced. The book has a light read vibe to it until a certain twist towards the end which doesn't fit with that vibe at all. Not a lot of the mysteries get resolved in this book and it ends with one hell of a cliffhanger. Thankfully, the sequel concluding this duology will come out soon. I do want to find out how it all ends.

Enum & Valerie reviewed What the River Knows by Isabel Ibañez

What the River Knows

3 stars

I'm not really sure what to think of this. It's all so inconsequent. For context, this book plays in colonized Egypt, in the year 1884. And the two character alignments are: good archeologists who want to preserve everything and thus have to keep it secret so future Egyptians can learn about it - and the bad people who sell everything they get their hands on. So this is superficially anti-colonialist, yet all the relevant people are Englishmen, Frenchmen or Argentinians. Only two Egyptians in the book have names, and they're entirely replaceable, with no plot relevance and no agency.

And the "evil" side who's illegally trading artifacts is so flat, not even the motivations make sense (if it's money then why did Lourdes risk losing her giant fortune to Ricardo???)

lastblossom reviewed What the River Knows by Isabel Ibañez (Secrets of the Nile, #1)

An immersive narration with a bit of everything - romance, mystery, action, and just a dash of magic.

No rating

About halfway through this book, I thought "fans of The Mummy would probably like this." And then I discovered it's one of the comps, so, you know. Uh, I guess I agree. To be more precise, this is for fans of prickly romances featuring an intelligent but sheltered young woman and a dashing self-assured man with a military history, all set in Egypt while a bunch of rich colonizer types try to steal artifacts. The action pieces are big and high energy, with mysterious deaths, a secret dig, museum rivalries, and illegal artifact sales, all described in beautiful immersive detail. Also, there is magic. And if it sounds like I threw that in there as a casual aside, it's because the book kind of does too. There's magic in the world, even if no one remembers how to control it. But pieces of it here and there are common enough …

About halfway through this book, I thought "fans of The Mummy would probably like this." And then I discovered it's one of the comps, so, you know. Uh, I guess I agree. To be more precise, this is for fans of prickly romances featuring an intelligent but sheltered young woman and a dashing self-assured man with a military history, all set in Egypt while a bunch of rich colonizer types try to steal artifacts. The action pieces are big and high energy, with mysterious deaths, a secret dig, museum rivalries, and illegal artifact sales, all described in beautiful immersive detail. Also, there is magic. And if it sounds like I threw that in there as a casual aside, it's because the book kind of does too. There's magic in the world, even if no one remembers how to control it. But pieces of it here and there are common enough that it's no big deal. At least, not yet. The story seems to imply that magic is going to be a much bigger deal in future installments, and truly I am hoping for future installments. Because that cliffhanger? Dang.

Thanks to NetGalley and Wednesday Books for an advance copy. All thoughts in this review are my own.

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Feb 20

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Jan 26