Reviewed by phyllish on
The premise behind the book was interesting. A modern-day Indiana Jones type story. Sadly, it didn’t live up to my expectations.
I liked the overall storyline of the book. The idea of an adventure in Egypt while tracking down stolen artifacts is intriguing to me. There was a spiritual element to the book, while not overt, which was done well.
Each chapter started with a fact about a gemstone. That was a nice touch that I appreciated. I was sad to find out, however, that the white topaz earrings I purchased in South Africa are pretty much only valuable for the memories they give me of that trip. Alas! At least I’m not surprised by learning that.
The romance in the story just didn’t make sense to me. Donnie had just met Priscilla and was all of a sudden desperately in love with her. What? While I’ve read stories that have a similarly short time between the meeting and the infatuation where it works, it just didn’t in this book. Priscilla went from mourning her fiancé who was killed three years earlier to being so in love after two days. Again, what?
There were some other things that also bothered me. Priscilla was a Brit, and yet she spoke and acted like an American. There were elements of the mystery that didn’t make sense and there were parts of the story that seemed incomplete. While there was talk of action and adventure, it was more spoken of than experienced.
The language used was also distracting to me. Word choices were made that were wrong for the context and there were turns of phrases that were awkward. This wasn’t just a situation of typos that weren’t caught, it was more like the author was trying to use fancier sounding words and the ones she used didn’t mean what she thought they did. I do wish the editors had caught these things.
Despite my opinion, many others have liked this story as evidenced by the 56 reviewers on Amazon who gave the book an average of 4.3 stars.
This review was originally posted on Among the Reads
I would like to thank Celebrate Lit for giving me this item. My opinion and review were not influenced by this gift.
Reading updates
- Started reading
- Finished reading
- 2 April, 2018: Reviewed