“In Egypt? We’re all looking for something.”
Author: Isabel Ibañez
A plucky young heroine, willing to risk life and reputation for answers. An embittered man with a shady past and the capability to fight crocodiles in the Nile. A mysterious, underground artifact stealing ring. Pyramids and magic and Cleopatra. Secrets and betrayal. Forbidden love and broken families. Death, disaster, and hope. It’s all here.
I first encountered Isabel Ibanez in Woven in Moonlight, another YA novel where she blends magical realism with fairy-tale like worlds, plucky heroines, danger, and betrayal. I fell in love, so when my beloved Book of the Month offered another of Ibanez’ fantastic tales, this time with echoes of The Mummy, I immediately dove in.
In What the River Knows, we meet our heroine, Olivera, a Bolivian Argentinian citizen, left behind by her feckless parents to live with her constricting, proper aunt. Olivera longs for her mother and father, but they are more interested in prowling the bazaars of Egypt and traveling unopened tombs to seek magical artifacts than they are in their daughter. When news of their inexplicable deaths arrives, Olivera finds herself permanently trapped with her aunt. She’s an heiress, yes, but she never got what she longed for most: her parents’ love.
But something doesn’t ring true to Olivera. How could her parents have made such an amateur mistake? The letter from Tio Ricardo, her uncle who remains at the dig, leaves her with more questions than answers. She is tired of being a distant, second thought. She is tired of hearing about this place she is never allowed to see. She is ready to risk everything for answers, for that final connection with her parents, however complicated and tenuous their relationship was.
And so, our nineteen-year-old upper society, sheltered heroine throws caution and rules to the wind and stows away for Egypt. There, she gets more than she bargained for. An ancient artifact, sent by her father, leads Olivera to Cleopatra’s tomb, proving to be both a key for the dig and for her parents’ secrets. Were they murdered by Olivera’s uncle? Betrayed by artifact thieves? Involved in something treacherous and elicit? What really drew them to Egypt, and did she ever really know them at all?
As the story continues, Tio Ricardo tries to send his recalcitrant niece back to safety before it’s too late. He mostly does this in true book parenting style – from afar, through a third party. Enter Whit – the handsome aide-de-camp who drinks too much whisky, is ruggedly handsome, cusses like a man, and uses his cynicism and flirtation to breathtaking effect. Whit is, of course, both the danger and the love interest. He finds himself drawn to Olivera’s brazen thwarting of society and rules, her trueness to self and family. But he has secrets too.
As the story continues, we learn that this world, like our own, has one big difference. Magic was once very prevalent, and while humanity has lost the skill, spells continue through ancient artifacts. You can use these artifacts – some to shrink things, others to bring endless water, others as a light. But there are more uses and even memories embedded in them. This magical part of the world adds an exotic spark to the familiar, but it is never fully explained and, in the end, it’s not entirely even necessary to the story. This is one of the few sour notes in an otherwise sweet symphony, but because everything else is so good, we decide to just believe unreservedly and leave our inner five-year-olds and their constant “whys” to sit in the background, ignored but not entirely forgotten.
Olivera is the typical heroine. She means well, but she is also a catalyst for disaster and, naturally, gets taken in very easily. Again, those five-year-olds scream in the background: “BUT WHY!” This time we have to listen. For someone so independent, so plucky, so angry at her parents, why does she accept the first “answer” she finds without any basic suspicion? Another character (not Whit) says as much to her, but sadly, Olivera’s trusting nature, her inability to sense and anticipate duplicity, puts the people of this world in endless danger. It’s exciting and leads to some tense scenes and a truly surprising action in the finale, but it’s also a bit exasperating. Will this girl never learn that her recklessness has a price?
The romance, a pseudo enemies-to-lovers motif, is, of course, also stereotypical in its ways. We have our Indian-Jones like male, who is uber masculine in all ways and just desperate for a good woman to fix him. I should really, really pick on this. But I can’t. I loved the romance. I was all the way in from the beginning. It hits all the right chords emotionally and physically. It just worked. So what if it’s not original? There is nothing new under the sun, as the Bible says, and I was all for the Whit scenes. Dang, the dude is masculine for sure, and who doesn’t love a guy that wrestles some gators for his girl? I mean, really, what more can you ask for?
The big surprise then comes even after the cataclysmic fallout of Olivera’s thoughtless actions – her act of faith and well-intended self-sacrifice. The epilogue left me reeling. We’ve had so many betrayals and shared secrets in this story, so much rage and hurt, but this last revelation was not anticipated. It shook everything I thought that I had come to rely on and left me logging onto Amazon to immediately buy the sequel – something I usually don’t do.
Overall, while What the River Knows isn’t perfect, it is perfectly good and enthralling. The characters – and by this I really mean Olivera, let’s be real – will both enchant and annoy you at times, but the story remains true to itself, serpentine and seductive. It’s a world that lures us, and despite our occasional unanswered “whys,” by the end we have come to believe and care in equal parts. Recommended.
– Frances Carden
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