Review: River God

So sometimes at that book sale I see Egypt historical books by Wilber Smith. I wound up buying one, but usually Victor told me not to bother because the author was pretty bad. But I had to give it a try. So I wound up reading River God. On one hand I want to say Victor was right. Don't bother. On the other hand once I overlooked the bad parts I was able to enjoy it. As long as you don't get tired of rolling your eyes it's pretty entertaining. As with a lot of "historical" anything fiction you have to take it with a grain of salt and look up anything you didn't know to see if the author/director was accurate. Apparently this book is filled with so many inaccuracies that I'm going to have to try hard to get these "facts" out of my head so I don't look stupid. One thing I did catch onto on my own pretty easily was the stunning amount of white people. In ancient Egypt? I could understand maybe a slave or two who was captured in a far land and somehow wound up there. But the son of one of the leading nobles who was in the running for grand vizier having red hair and green eyes? He's not alone, however, as there are several of these types running around. I'm not sure exactly which period of time this was in (my grasp of Egyptian history is looser than my grasp of British history, and I already explained how little I actually know in a previous post), but it just doesn't seem right to me. This was before they had chariots (as they encounter chariots for the first time in this book) so I presume it's before Rome so they hadn't really encountered people from the north-west yet I think, and I thought redheads mostly came from various parts of Europe? I could be wrong and I don't feel like looking it up right now.

In addition to the inaccuracies we have the characters. The main character is a total Marty Stu, like, this author could give Harry Potter fanfiction writers a good run for who has the best Marty Stu. Personally I think the HP writers would win because the main character isn't related to anyone important. The secondary characters aren't much better. The lead female is perfect, the secondary male is perfect, characters who show up later are perfect. etc.

It was fun but I won't be looking for the other books by this author. I don't regret reading it. I mainly regret the author's inability to write good characters.

Now I'll move on to the spoiler-ific part of this.

Baby Blanket

Finished the baby blanket! I guess you can use Victor's leg as a scale to see how big it is, lol. I used this pattern.

Close up look at the shells... half-shells I guess really..