Author: Stephanie Dray
Date of Publication: December 5, 2013
Formats Available: E-book
Number of Pages: 56
Buy This Book: Amazon
Synopsis: Before she became one of Egypt's greatest queens, she was a lonely princess who ached to belong...
Princess Arsinoe came of age in the glittering court of Ptolemaic Egypt. Abused by her ruthless sister, a pawn in the dynastic ambitions of her father, and dismissed by the king who claimed her for a bride, young Arsinoe finds herself falling in love with a young man forbidden to her. She dreams of a great destiny, but if she is ever to rule Egypt, she must first survive the nest of vipers otherwise known as her family.
My Review:
I've always been fascinated by Egyptian history so when I saw this short story for free on Amazon I just knew that I had to download it. I don't know as much about Egypt's history as I would like so I was excited to start this story and hopefully learn a little bit in the process. I've never heard of Arsinoe and her story was interesting and heartbreaking, unfortunately I felt like The Princess of Egypt Must Die just didn't quite do justice to what could have been a fascinating story.
Because of the short length I felt like the majority of the story was rushed and not very well put together. I was thrown into the world of Arsinoe without any prior knowledge and had to piece together little everything along the way. Additionally this story is a very dramatic one; full of lying, backstabbing, and deceit, however because of the rushed feel of the story I felt like a lot of the suspense and drama was lost because the author was in such a hurry to move from one event to the other. I felt like this story was a summary rather than an actual short story.
Even though Arsinoe was somewhat developed I felt like all the secondary characters were nothing more than shells. I barely knew anyone in the story other than Arsinoe and because of the nature of the story I felt like I needed to know the secondary characters a little more to truly appreciate it. There was lots to learn about each of the characters, and they each had their own angle, but they were barely skimmed over in order to move more quickly to the next event.
I wouldn't say this was a bad short story, just because of the original and fascinating premise, but it just wasn't long enough to make it truly amazing. Had it been a full length novel, which would have given each of the events enough time to be properly executed and allowed all of the secondary characters to develop more of a personality, I would have enjoyed it much more. Fans of Egyptian history will be interested by the story but this novel feels more like a summary than an actual work of fiction.
3/5
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