By Dugald A. Steer
A gorgeous recovered explorer's journal, with flaps, maps, a jewel, and a scrap of mummy cloth, that turns real Egyptian mythology into a hunt for the lost tomb of a god.
This is dressed up as the 1926 travel journal of Emily Sands, an explorer who sailed the Nile searching for the lost tomb of the god Osiris, and then vanished. It is a lavish object as much as a book: booklets to open, fold-out maps, postcards, hand-written notes, and things you can actually touch, a scrap of "mummy cloth," a glittering "jewel" set into the page. Woven all through the adventure is real ancient Egypt, the gods, the hieroglyphs, the pyramids, the geography of the Nile, so a child chasing the mystery is soaking up genuine mythology and history without noticing. It is a book to handle and pore over, and one they will keep for years.
For the Egypt-mad child who loves to handle and linger over a book, this is an experience, a mystery to solve wrapped around real mythology and history. The lost-tomb frame gives all the facts a story to hang on, and the flaps and touchable samples pull in even a child who is really there for the object rather than the reading. It is one of those books that becomes a keepsake.