A review by elvenavari
The Collector's Daughter: A Novel of the Discovery of Tutankhamun's Tomb by Gill Paul

4.0

Review of the audio book, read by Imogen Church.

This book was sad, okay? At least for me.

We are given the dual narrative of Lady Evelyn (Herbert) Beauchamp. The first POV is set in the 1920s when Evelyn is a young woman with dreams of being one of the first female archaeologists, and is one of the first to enter the tomb of Tutankhamun. The second POV is set in the 1970s when Evelyn is an older woman and has suffered a number of strokes, the latest one playing some serious havoc on her memory. But, if nothing else, Evelyn is determined and she works to get herself back to at least something of what she was before the last stroke. From the description, she did an amazing job of it.

And then there is the villain... Anna, an Egyptian academic who is determined to recover the items Evelyn, her father and Howard Carter secretly took from the tomb all those years ago. I may have been more sympathetic to Anna had she entered the picture 20 years before but as it was, Evelyn's frail health played right into her hands.

The ending was just...sad.

Imogen Church did a wonderful job narrating. I laughed every time she tried to sing Brograve's version of the National Anthem.