Title: The Lost Goddess
Author: Alasdair Grant
Genre: Historical fantasy
Date Read: 11/12/14- 19/12/14
Rating: ★★★★
Review:
The Lost Goddess is actually made up of two books, The Isis Stone and The Dominion Scepter, but the edition I was reading treated them as parts one and two of a single book, so that’s how I’m going to review them.
Brooke Caldwell’s father is an Egyptologist, and Brooke has grown up listening to Egyptian mythology and visiting dig sites with her father. When her dad goes missing inside a tomb, Brooke goes after him, only to discover a mummy that looks exactly like her and to be thrown into the world of the Egyptian gods and goddesses (the Neteru), who claim she is their lost goddess, Isis, who went missing for seventeen years. In the second book, Brooke needs to convince a boy at her school that he is really the god Osiris, and that they must return to the world of the Neteru together in order prevent Apep, the embodiment of Chaos, from destroying both worlds.
I was really excited to find a book based on Egyptian mythology. While I know very little about it, I do find it really fascinating, and Rick Riordan’s The Red Pyramid just didn’t really do it for me. The Lost Goddess felt authentic in its descriptions of the Netert and the other aspects of Ancient Egyptian life. While of course, this was a fantasy adaptation of the mythology, it was clear that Alasdair Grant was familiar with his source material before he started tinkering with it.
The books are not fast-paced, but they do move along at a good speed. While a lot of the plot is spent traveling, there is enough conflict between the characters to sustain the reader between action scenes. There was a great contrast between the world of the Netert and the Shens (I think that was the word – the peasants, essentially) and the politics between the Netert themselves and the two classes was well constructed. In Part 2, I really loved that while there was a romance between Brooke/Isis and Logan/Osiris, they didn’t let it get in the way of the things they had to do. I also really enjoyed that Brooke called Logan out when he was being a jerk, instead of just shrugging it off.
The story is concluded in the two books, so there is no needing to wait for a third installment (trilogies really are the thing right now, aren’t they?), which I appreciated. This was a really enjoyable read and I hope that the books might get a bit more exposure in the future.
A Keyboard and an Open Mind 