The Snow Sister is a very short book for younger readers than Carroll's other works. She doesn't shy away from darker elements in her stories, so the young girl protagonist has a dead older sister that she recreates in snow before Christmas. She comes from a poor family with a newly-deceased rich uncle who left something to his brother, the girl's father. As her father goes to find out what, the family assumes they'll be rich. The girl sets out to get pudding ingredients at the store and through a series of misadventures, ends up spending the night in the home of the wealthiest family in town, where she learns that family and love are more important than money. She also learns that it's this dude who inherited her uncle's fortune. When she gets home, she learns her family got...the uncle's daughter. They're happy to have a new person in their family, a semi-replacement for the dead older sister, and he left some jewelry behind to be sold to help pay for her upkeep, but I don't like any of this. Why leave your fortune to some dickbag rich dude you mentored when you could leave it for YOUR CHILD? Just make it where she can't access it until she's older. I hope there's enough jewelry there to take care of her for years, because they're gonna need it.
So not the best thoughts about this author going into the second book. This one's a pretty wild ride. The framing and concluding chapters take place at the Villa Diodati, during the famous gathering of Lord Byron and the Shelleys. The central and main part of the story is from the POV of a young girl who, along with her mother, was struck by lightning. There are mysterious animal disappearances and deaths, a comet in the sky, an elusive creepy scientist...who turns out not to be the scientist in the story after all. It's an interesting tale and much better than the Snow Sister. I don't want to give too much away, but all these events lead Mary Shelley to write her famous work.
Ah, finally we get to the one I wanted to read most. This is set in Egypt as Howard Carter is finding the tomb of the now-legendary King Tut. This one's an excellent journey with solid characters, a twisting backstory that resolves in a pretty unbelievable way, curses, and portions of the story set in ancient Egypt. The whole thing is extremely unbelievable. You've just got to set that aside.
As an Egyptologist, two things did bother me.
First, the author uses "hieroglyphics." This is not a word. Hieroglyphic is the writing system. One glyph is a hieroglyph. Multiple glyphs are hieroglyphs. Likely some would argue that "hieroglyphics" has become so commonly used that it has become a word, but that's a load. If you're writing about Egypt and you want to sound like you did a lick of research, never ever use "hieroglyphics." I mean, unless you're writing for a character that is meant to sound uneducated and it's a conscious decision to use the incorrect word. I wouldn't mind the young girl that's the POV using it if it was ever made clear in the text that it's not the correct term. Regardless, whenever I see it, it ruins the story by taking me right out of it, and I just sit and wonder how much research was done if this bad an error was made.
Second, the canopic jar that's the focus of the protagonist's problem is described as having the head of Anubis. I kept waiting for this to be dealt with. It never was. You see, the four canopic jar heads are a human, a falcon, a baboon and yes, a jackal. But this jackal is NOT Anubis. It's Duamutef. It's a mistake someone who didn't know much would make, because yeah, he looks just like Anubis. So when it first happened, I was okay with her not knowing the proper deity on the jar, but as the story went on, it was revealed that the jar held the heart. The heart is not typically removed during mummification, so there is no jar for it. It was never said if the character who put the heart in the jar just used a random Duamutef one or maybe had a special jar he had made for this purpose and did put Anubis's head on it.
Not things that would bother the average reader, but both took me out of the story a bit, because I know how things should be. (And I get annoyed when people don't research properly.)
The story itself is an excellent ride and I do recommend giving this a read. You likely won't be as bothered by the errors as I was, but hey, at least you know the right information now.
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