A review by amynbell
Crocodile on the Sandbank by Elizabeth Peters

adventurous mysterious slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

1.0

This book was, quite frankly, horrible. I saw two people gushing over it and remembered the series from my high school library, so I thought I would be fun to read for nostalgia's sake. Boy, was I wrong. Between the culture-bashing, male-bashing, and being written in the most boring way possible, I'm surprised I even finished it. The story is narrated by a self-sufficient Victorian heiress who has gone to Egypt for adventure. I always enjoyed novels narrated by self-sufficient ladies fighting their way through a man's world when I was younger, but Amelia Peabody is just annoyingly superior. She seems to magically know everything about medicine and even learns fairly fluent Arabic and hieroglyphics by studying them on the boat ride to Egypt. Once she gets to Egypt, she can's set sail down the Nile until the curtains on her boat don't clash with her wardrobe.

Of course, she finally meets a man who puts her in her place:
"I know you, madam! I have met your kind too often —the rampageous British female at her clumsiest and most arrogant. Ye gods! The breed covers the earth like mosquitoes, and is as maddening. The depths of the pyramids, the heights of the Himalayas—no spot on earth is safe from you!”


And she retaliates in kind:
“And you, sir, are the lordly British male at his loudest and most bad-mannered. If the English gentlewoman is covering the earth, it is in the hope of counteracting some of the mischief her lord and master has perpetrated. Swaggering, loud, certain of his own superiority…”


*eyeroll*

Several people have compared this particular Amelia Peabody book to Scooby Doo since the main storyline involves someone dressing as a mummy and terrorizing the locals, while Amelia Peabody and her friends try to figure out who it is. And I suppose that could have been interesting if the majority of the book after the mummy appears hadn't simply become vague moments of action requiring multiple readings to try to figure out, with 90% of the rest of the text comprised of characters discussing what happened and what they are going to do ad nauseam. Oh, and let's not forget the part where Amelia looks down upon all the Egyptians living in dirty squalor and preventing their children from batting away the flies that are covering their eyes and making them go blind. Really?

This book has absolutely no redeeming qualities, and the only crocodile on a sandbank is from an ancient poem. Will I read any more Amelia Peabody books? Absolutely not.
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