A review by bluejayreads
Neferura by Malayna Evans

Did not finish book. Stopped at 23%.
My first DNF book of 2024, and it has nothing to do with the book's subject. I'm a huge Ancient Egypt fan and I loved the idea of a story focused on women's power and featuring the daughter of one of the very few female pharaohs. But it really failed in execution. Malayna has clearly done her research and knows a lot about the history and the time period. But it feels anachronistic in a way that's really hard to place. I think it has something to do with the characters, who feel like a variety of modern people who just happen to live in a world that looks like Ancient Egypt. Modern values and opinions seem plastered over the trappings of the time period. Though it's definitely not a YA book, stylistically it seems closer to something written for the younger teens. It also feels unpolished, like either the writer is either fairly young or this is one of their earliest forays into fiction. The characters are unremarkable and don't seem to have any real goals or desires. Supposedly they have relationships to each other, but there's never a sense that our titular protagonist actually cares about any of them. I think Neferura's emotions were the most confusing thing about her, because they never seemed to fit what a normal person would feel. Simple, inane things leave her struggling not to cry from sheer frustration; her mother's casual cruelty doesn't seem to even register. I feel like a real pharaoh's daughter would not make it to adulthood being as naïve and gullible as she is - she'd either get wise or be chewed up by the allegedly-ruthless court. And don't even get me started on the body-shaming and fat-shaming in this book. The very first line is Neferura getting body-shamed by her mother. In the first twenty-four pages, she is fat-shamed by her mother twice, by her own narration three or four times, and she fat-shames her mother once. It's excessive and entirely unnecessary to anything in the story. So on the whole, while I think the concept is interesting and I would definitely be open to a book exploring Ancient Egypt with Nefertiti's daughter, this book does not do that idea justice. 
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