What the River Knows - Isabel Ibañez - ★

AUTHOR: Isabel Ibañez

SERIESS: Secrets of the Nile, #1

GENRE: (YA) Historical Fantasy

PUBLICATION DATE: October 31, 2023

RATING: 1 charitable star.

In a Nutshell: A historical fantasy with an annoying lead, half-baked worldbuilding, minimal magical detailing, and anachronous behaviour. It’s a book with an identity crisis – it just doesn’t know what it wants to be. Officially YA but many scenes aren’t suitable for younger YAs. Cliffhanger ending, but I am not interested in knowing what happens next. Not recommended at least to sensible adults. Older YAs might try their luck.

Plot Preview:

1884. Bolivian-Argentinian Inez has always lived a comfortable life at her aunt’s place, but the one thing she wants the most is to be with her parents who work with antiques in Egypt. When the eighteen-year-old receives news of their sudden deaths, leaving her a wealthy orphan, she decides to sail to Cairo to her maternal uncle, an archaeologist, to know what happened to them. She carries her sketch pads and an old ring her father had sent her. Unbeknownst to her, the ring is magical, and on her arrival, it reveals to her certain truths that cast doubt on the cause of her parents’ disappearance and her uncle’s role in it. In a strange place, Inez has only one person she can confide in: her uncle’s British assistant Whit, who is annoying but also attractive. [Yup. Eyeroll!]

The story comes to us mostly in the first-person perspective of Inez, with some sections coming in Whit’s first-person POV.

Bookish Yays:

😍 The cover art.

Bookish Okays:

🤔 The description of Cairo’s pyramids and a part of its history. Sadly, the descriptions are restricted to what we need to know instead of setting up a detailed world for better context.

🤔 The mention of how the British destroyed Egyptian culture in the name of colonial improvement. Coming from a country that faced a similar looting by the same coloniser, I appreciate this mention. But I also find it ironic that these strong sentiments come from Inez, whose own Argentinian family is involved in excavating Egyptian artefacts. What double standards!

Bookish Nays:

🙄 Inez. If there were an award for the most annoying female in fiction, we would have the world-class champion right here. She’s an stubborn, cocky, idiotic, desperate, judgemental spoilt brat. The kind of typical protagonist we see in poorly-written YA books, who can do anything at first attempt despite her sheltered upbringing. I was frustrated by her girl-boss behaviour.

🙄 Ines’s first-person POV. Almost as irritating and wishy-washy as her. She keeps shifting between “I can't trust XYZ” and “Whom can I trust but XYZ?” Sheesh!

🙄 Whit. An annoying cocky drunk as the romantic lead. Isn't that what everyone wants from the MMC? 🙄 His first-person interludes added nothing important to the plot nor do they make us connect better with him.

🙄 The other characters – equally annoying. Hardly anyone has (a) a spine, (b) guts, and/or (c) integrity.

🙄 The plot development. Mostly slow and dull. The worst was the illogical twists just for the sake of having twists.

🙄 The poor writing, where the situations and setting seem historical but the character behaviour and dialogues feel contemporary. Inez didn’t seem to be living in the 1880s at all except for the mention of her outfits.

🙄 So many stupid scenes! Like, imagine being in a dangerous drowning situation in a river of strong currents and you still find time WHILE DROWNING to have a repartee with your rescuer and even to think about his attractive muscular arms under his wet shirt. Who can talk so much while almost sinking? 🤯

🙄 The identity crisis in the genre. YA, fantasy, historical fiction, romance, murder mystery, coming-of-age, adventure… It goes everywhere and nowhere! Hardly any genre is done justice to.

🙄 The YA-inappropriate content. Why call a book YA when there’s tongue kissing and brutal murders and severe alcoholism and infidelity and various other things younger kids have no business reading? This ought to have been tagged NA.

🙄 The magic system – very convenient in its appearance and disappearance. The fantastical content is very half-baked; we are told multiple times what happens but the how is always absent. Rather than being infused with magic, the plot utilises the magic only when it remembers to.

🙄 The repetition in thoughts, words, and actions. Adds to the boredom. No one seems to learn anything in this book!

🙄 The romance. Totally inappropriate and unnecessary. It can't even be called love, more like a two-sided lust.

🙄 The Elvira track. WTH!?!? Laziest plotting idea I have seen of late!

🙄 So much miscommunication!

🙄 For a book set in Egypt, Egyptians barely have a good role to play. There is a single token representation, but most of the plot is handled by the British and the South Americans.

🙄 The cliffhanger ending. Not even that good! I think book blurbs should mandatorily mention “cliffhanger ending”.

🙄 I still don’t know what the river knows. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Overall, this book was such an utter and complete disappointment. 400 pages of wasted time and loads of eye-rolling. That said, this book has a fairly high GR rating (3.82 stars as of writing this review), so it looks like I read a different book from most readers. I don’t pick YA books anymore as they rarely work for me. This one was from my ARC backlog, taken when I was still optimistic about the genre. But even evaluated through a YA lens, I cannot find any merits in this.

The blurb calls this “The Mummy meets Death on the Nile”. I haven’t read the Christie classic yet, but the comparison to ‘The Mummy’ is just idiotic. Anything set in Egypt and involving dead Pharaohs isn't ‘The Mummy’! You’ll have a more entertaining time watching the movie.

This is the first of a duology, but this storyline didn’t need two books of almost 400 pages each. Had that stupid romance been chucked out and all the fluff removed, this could have been a single novel. I have had my fill of this story and am not the least bit curious to know what happens next. Good luck to Ines in whatever awaits her in the next book. (I hope it is the same as Elvira’s fate.)

Not recommended from me. But I am just one reviewer and there are plenty others who have loved this. Please do read some more opinions before you take a plunge in this river. And if you learn what it knows, do share it with me.

My thanks to St. Martin's Press for providing the DRC of “What the River Knows” via NetGalley. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book. Sorry this didn’t work better for me.