By Eloise Jarvis McGraw
A clever, defiant slave girl in ancient Egypt becomes a double spy in a deadly palace plot, and falls in love with a man she may have to betray.
Mara is a slave in ancient Egypt, sharp-tongued, quick-witted, and desperate to be free. Her cleverness gets her bought by a mysterious man who wants her to spy, and then, in secret, she's hired to spy for the other side too, which makes her a dangerous, high-stakes double agent inside a palace conspiracy. The plot swirls around real history: the aging Queen Hatshepsut on the throne and the young Pharaoh Thutmose III, held back and waiting, with nobles scheming to put him in power. Mara's playing both sides for her own freedom until she falls in love with Sheftu, one of the young conspirators, and suddenly the game has a cost she never counted on. It's a fast, twisty spy story wrapped in gorgeous ancient-Egypt detail, by the author of The Golden Goblet.
This is the shelf's page-turner and its stretch, the one to hand an older reader who wants ancient history with genuine thriller momentum. Mara is a fantastic heroine, brave and flawed and always improvising, and the double-agent premise keeps the tension screwed tight while the setting teaches a reader about Hatshepsut, Thutmose III, and the machinery of a royal court almost by accident. There's a real romance at its heart, which is part of why it reads older than The Golden Goblet, and the stakes climb to life-or-death. For a mature 11-to-13-year-old finishing an ancient-Egypt unit, it's the satisfying, grown-up capstone.