Scan barcode
A review by nooralshanti
She Who Comes Forth by Audrey Driscoll
3.0
She Who Comes Forth is a novel about a young English-American woman who has just finished a degree in Ancient History and has taken a job at an archaeological dig site in Egypt.
The first two thirds of the novel are focused on the minutiae of her life at the dig site as she tries to navigate the politics of the dig site. Mainly she wants to avoid being assaulted by the creepy professor at the head of the archaeological dig and try to find useful things to do because she's not really that useful at the dig site among all the other much more experienced archaeologists. I found this part to be relatively interesting and in particular I enjoyed the section with the musical performance and the character's preparation for it. I also enjoyed the little hints of magic and power that were interspersed throughout the first half of the novel. For me, as someone who reads stuff that is much more steeped in magic, the source of this power was pretty obvious from the first hint, but I still enjoyed watching the character slowly begin to notice these "powers".
And then the second half of the novel, where the character gets fully immersed in these Ancient Egyptian powers and mysteries happens and it's such a huge shift in tone that it feels like a completely different story: one that I found both extremely boring and problematic. The writing, which had been so smooth before suddenly became extremely vaguely flowery. There was page after page of fluffy nonsensical prose that I think was meant to be "cool" or "awe-inspiring" or something. It didn't have that effect on me at all. I found it hard to follow (and stay awake for) and also just silly-sounding. But I've never really found the whole pyramids, mummies, and ancient tombs stuff interesting so I was prepared to chalk it up to this just being not my type of thing.
And then the "big showdown" of the novel happened. Where the heroine, France, has to face her role in all these weird things and take control of her powers to face the bad guy. She is supposedly doing this to save the world from some kind of nuclear-style apocalypse. And this is what I found extremely offensive and degrading to the character that I had been following for so many pages and to female leads in general.Her power ends up being that she has sex with the bad guy, then this "sex-magic" as it's referred to in the book itself - I kid you not - allows her to move through physical stone *which she did before, without the sex, by the way*at which point she calls upon some ancient Egyptian diety to destroy the bad guy. Several pages more of meaningless fluff prose followed after which the character emerged from this experience back into the real world and we were back to the same novel from the first part of the book to watch her attempt to explain her "experience" with a mixture of lies and half-truths because she obviously can't tell the whole truth. Honestly, I would have much preferred this book if the whole experience she had was just written as if it was some type of drug-induced hallucination.
In the end I struggled with the rating of this book because for the first 2/3 of it I was clearly going to give it a solid 4-star rating and then it just fell apart into something so different and so not enjoyable to me that I considered bringing the rating down to a 2. I settled on 3 stars. If you're more into the type of book which blends the otherworldly tales of "Gods" and legends in with this world and if you like tomb-raider or Indiana Jones type stories you might be fine with the last third of the book. You may even enjoy it. Just be warned there's a random graphic sex scene that comes out of literally nowhere.
The first two thirds of the novel are focused on the minutiae of her life at the dig site as she tries to navigate the politics of the dig site. Mainly she wants to avoid being assaulted by the creepy professor at the head of the archaeological dig and try to find useful things to do because she's not really that useful at the dig site among all the other much more experienced archaeologists. I found this part to be relatively interesting and in particular I enjoyed the section with the musical performance and the character's preparation for it. I also enjoyed the little hints of magic and power that were interspersed throughout the first half of the novel. For me, as someone who reads stuff that is much more steeped in magic, the source of this power was pretty obvious from the first hint, but I still enjoyed watching the character slowly begin to notice these "powers".
And then the second half of the novel, where the character gets fully immersed in these Ancient Egyptian powers and mysteries happens and it's such a huge shift in tone that it feels like a completely different story: one that I found both extremely boring and problematic. The writing, which had been so smooth before suddenly became extremely vaguely flowery. There was page after page of fluffy nonsensical prose that I think was meant to be "cool" or "awe-inspiring" or something. It didn't have that effect on me at all. I found it hard to follow (and stay awake for) and also just silly-sounding. But I've never really found the whole pyramids, mummies, and ancient tombs stuff interesting so I was prepared to chalk it up to this just being not my type of thing.
And then the "big showdown" of the novel happened. Where the heroine, France, has to face her role in all these weird things and take control of her powers to face the bad guy. She is supposedly doing this to save the world from some kind of nuclear-style apocalypse. And this is what I found extremely offensive and degrading to the character that I had been following for so many pages and to female leads in general.
In the end I struggled with the rating of this book because for the first 2/3 of it I was clearly going to give it a solid 4-star rating and then it just fell apart into something so different and so not enjoyable to me that I considered bringing the rating down to a 2. I settled on 3 stars. If you're more into the type of book which blends the otherworldly tales of "Gods" and legends in with this world and if you like tomb-raider or Indiana Jones type stories you might be fine with the last third of the book. You may even enjoy it. Just be warned there's a random graphic sex scene that comes out of literally nowhere.