Okay, guys. Stop me if you’ve heard this story before.A teenage girl who believes herself to be plain and yet ‘not like the other girls’, is whisked off on a far-flung adventure with a mysterious, “exotic” prince who has found his way to America, with whom she has a cosmic connection in the pre-destined, soulmate kind of way. This girl is the only person in the whole world who is able to break the curse that has been placed upon our princely love interest, who has been trapped in a hellish limbo where for centuries he has not been able to communicate nor fight his way out of his predicament. Whilst in this new location, she meets a scholarly older man who explains a lot of the mythology/historical interest sites, and is generally receptive to multiple call-and-response dialogue sections where one character asks a question, and another explains. Also, lots of attention is paid to detail on food and temple interiors and while you might feel from time to time that you’re in a temple, you certainly don’t feel as if you’re visiting the particular country that the writer had in mind.Yeah. I just described Tiger’s Curse, didn’t I?The boilerplate for Reawakened is the exact same thing as Tiger’s Curse. Except this time, we’re swapping India for Egypt, and Lilliana, our stand-in for Kelsey actually has parents who are still alive. Not a huge divergence, but hey, I’ll take anything I can get so long as I never have to spend another moment inside the cotton wool bud-stuffed cavity that is Kelsey Hayes’ mind ever again.To be fair, there is a decent little bit of character development, in that Lilliana decides to break loose from the stifling conformity of her stupendously rich parents’ expectations and actually have fun and do something for herself for a change. Houck has also toned down the ridiculously overwrought sentimentality from her previous series, meaning that Lilliana is a lot more subtle about her issues, rather than hammering on about them every time there’s a slight gap in the narrative and our author couldn’t figure out quite what to put there, besides exposition.The plot is this: Lilliana Young gets swept up onto this grand, magical quest during a routine visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The Egyptian wing is currently playing host to a resurrected Ancient Egyptian guy named Amon, who is an avatar/demigod/whatever of the Kemetic sun god. Except that Amon is a stranger in a strange land, his bald head and shendyt clashing with local fashion sensibilities, and he doesn’t understand technology or English until he literally pulls a Pocahontas-style “Listen With Your Heart” hand-wave of a spell out of his backside in an effort to keep the story trundling along. Through some awkward, clunky set-up, Amon accidentally forges a magical bond with Lilliana, meaning that she is literally chained to him, her health deteriorates without him, and she has absolutely no choice in the matter of getting caught up in all this nonsense. Imagine that. A heroine in a Colleen Houck book with agency.Okay, that’s not entirely fair, considering that Lilliana is independent and feisty, despite cracking awful jokes (not awful as in - “grandpa made that pun and it was so bad I had to laugh,” no - so bad as in cringing every time Lilliana decides to crack a stupid and contextually-inappropriate joke) and making pop cultural references that are about thirty years out of date. Amon dances at one point, and she describes him as a fusion between ‘Elvis Presley and the Chippendales.’ Like Kelsey, Lilliana’s frames of reference for foreign cultures tends to be referring to whatever is the closest equivalent in American pop culture, as opposed to learning about the culture or the native mythology. Houck’s attention to detail is almost always focused on the wrong thing entirely. Amon makes a few classical time-traveller-in-the-future quips, like thinking a smartphone is a magic box and calling a taxi a ‘golden chariot’, but then forgets about this aspect of his character entirely. He gets on a plane with Lilliana, no fuss, no muss, and merrily chats with the hostesses and watches mummy movies with Lilliana like… eh? Shouldn’t you be amazed or, more likely, terrified at the prospect of how we future-dwellers have the technology to fly over an ocean?But yes, it turns out that Amon has seriously amazing magical powers. He can conjure up sandy whirlwinds that transport him and others to different locations, he moves sand around to create solid walls and blocks, he’s absolutely masterful at hypnosis and he can shape shift to some extent. It also doesn’t help that he’s incredibly good looking and has some kind of regal/godly presence that makes people want to do anything for him. All it takes is one or two conversations for him and Lilliana to head off to the airport and somehow get through security (through the power of hypnotism) and off towards Cairo.Ah, yes, Cairo. A focal point of the Arab Spring in 2011. The capital city of Egypt, a country which has undergone much in the way of political turmoil for several years. The president was ousted and replaced and groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood became quite prominent in the aftermath of these protests. But, even though this story is set in modern times, Egypt just seems perfectly fine and dandy. The only places really visited are a penthouse hotel room and a stereotypical, tourist-y depiction of the Valley of the Kings. It’s the same exact thing from Tiger’s Curse — you only ever see Kelsey living it large in hotels and mansions, with the brief interlude trekking through the jungle and exploring a temple that remains booby-trapped despite booby-trapped temples never having existed. (For both historical and logical reasons, I assure you.) This basically means we have a book set in Egypt which never feels like you’re actually there in the country. Sure, Houck describes some sights and smells, but honestly, the scenery painted for us is yet another series of bland caricatures that do not serve to immerse you in the world of the story. I never felt like I was in Egypt — not because I didn’t see hide nor hair of the fallout of the Arab Spring, but because the author simply couldn’t be bothered to write more characters or research more deeply into what makes the country so unique and how its people grow up in the society. You can swap Lilliana and Amon’s penthouse apartment for one in Portugal or Thailand. It doesn’t matter.Each stab at the ground of the various plot-holes that cropped up just wound up digging me further and further until I was nearly reaching the Earth’s core.Research flubs are so, so common in the books by this author. (Anubis is not the god of death/mummification, just so you know. That’s Osiris. But Anubis shows up so much in his in that role that you’d assume his uncle had posted up an OUT TO LUNCH sign and left little Anubis in charge.) The mythology is sometimes correct, if flavourless and watered down, but in terms of real world stuff… it’s clearly taken from Google and Wikipedia. Not bad sources to start with, and yes, we are both aware that Houck is writing fiction and not non-fiction, but there comes a point where you can’t glean any sort of credibility out of this novel whatsoever, despite the ‘claims’ of it being well researched. It’s incredibly easy to just start skim-reading halfway through the book, and not really miss out on anything. Houck’s characters are still fond of taking enormous exposition dumps all over the pages in regards to mythology or the role they are playing in this particular version of the story, etc. Which is sad, because if anything, the writing should have improved by now.Which it has. In dribs and drabs, if I’m going to be really nice for a moment. Houck is now signed to a bigger publisher, and the editing is a whole lot tighter than it was back in the days of Tiger’s Curse. Lilliana has moments of really good character development and Amon isn’t a pathetic spoiled brat who throws tables when he doesn’t get his own way (à la Ren from Tiger’s Curse). But, unfortunately, Houck’s storytelling suffers from narrative convenience to the point of seriously straining plausibility. Isn’t it awfully convenient that Amon can alter time/people’s perception’s of time/whatever, so that Lilliana will appear to have been spending a day in her bedroom in New York rather than diving down tombs in Giza? That he can hypnotise people into letting him and Lilliana live lavishly without any money whatsoever? That one can just hop in a taxi cab to JFK and grab a trans-Atlantic flight without bothering with security or passports or visas or airport duty because yay hypnotism? There’s no real obstacles or stakes for our characters, because everything can just be hand-waved away for the sake of quickly getting our characters to their destinations and doing that cool thing they’re meant to do.There’s no difficulty whatsoever for Amon, no guilt over having forced Lilliana into becoming his companion on this journey, and absolutely no tension as to completing this quest of his to retrieve his canopic jars and restore his life force so he and his brothers can stop Set from rising again and wreaking havoc on the world. The quest is so seldom mentioned that the plot simply becomes a series of getting our characters from point A to B, rather than their actions having some meaning or bringing some closure to the story at large, tying up plot threads and all that good stuff that is supposed to happen if you actually have the ability to tell a decent story.Houck’s issues with pacing crop up again in this novel. To the degree where one is almost three quarters of the way through the story before there’s any sort of plan regarding what to do with the Big Bad. The novel ends so hastily, too. The ending just goes absolutely nowhere, with boring, overwrought details about the Kemetic afterlife that could easily be gleaned from a Dorling Kindersley children’s guide to mythology.The characters are bland. At least in Tiger’s Curse, the brothers and the small handful of other characters have distinct personalities. Amon and his brothers have nothing going for them, and it’s a shame — you’d expect more from resurrected personifications of Egyptian gods, but nope. They just fulfil their narrative purpose, and then they’re gone. The focus remains - myopically - on our two main leads, and since there are no stakes to their story, we have absolutely no reason to care.There’s no real reason as to why Set rising again would cause any sort of calamity in the world. When you finally meet him, over 80% into the novel, you’ll find that… he’s just a scary monster who says cliché scary monster things. Yawn. There’s no foreshadowing, no real build-up… The novel is over five hundred pages, but could be pruned down to maybe four or three hundred, if only Houck were to take a break from writing trite romantic scenes that have little bearing on the plot and are more suited for Harlequin/Mills & Boon romance than young adult historical fantasy. I have never come across a writer who’s clearly visited by the Fairy of Awesome Story Ideas (which totally exists) but has no writerly ability to pull them off.Look. I don’t want to be unkind, I really don’t. But this is yet another dreadful, culturally-appropriative book which gets quite a few of its facts - both historical and mythological - so indelibly wrong, and strings along our characters on such convenient narrative pathways that there’s not much of a reason to want to follow them through their adventures. If you’re a die-hard fan of Ancient Egypt and Kemetic mythology, this might be best avoided. And avoid if you happen to enjoy good storytelling at all. 1/5.
One word: WOW.I seriously didn't expect this to be so good. I thought I'd get an everyday run-of-the-mill mythology story featuring some unlucky ancient Egyptian schmuck, but what I got instead was an entertaining, refreshing, action-packed adventure that left me not only at the edge of my seat but also in tears and in stitches.By the end of the book, I thought of one thing and one thing only: where's the next book, I need an ancient Egyptian prince for a boyfriend, maybe if I get lucky I can enter some tomb and magically find a handsome mummy, this is what the mummy movies should have been (oops, I'm not committing some sort of heresy with that statement, am I?)I've always been interested in Ancient Egypt - their culture, their values, their architecture, their society - everything. They're intriguing and there is this sense of mystery and mysticism from them that I find absolutely romantic and poetic. I've always waited for that one YA book that would feature Egyptian mythology and a reawakened Egyptian mummy (because come on, doesn't that just seem fun?), so imagine my surprise when that day came as soon as I got my hands on this book. It delivered, guys. It fricking delivered.I love how mythology was used here. It wasn't just a background for the characters but it was also something that directly affected the plot and kept it moving. It reminded me somehow of Richelle Mead's Age of X series, where the world is full of humans who have stopped believing in millenium-old mythologies and their gods, not knowing that these said gods were actually real and that they all lived in a distant time and plane separated from them. The same is pretty much used here, especially when Amon (no, not Amun), has been resurrected once again, as he has been every 1000 years since he was made a servant of the gods, in order to do a ritual to ensure the dark god Seth doesn't come to the mortal world once again and wreck it unimaginable havoc. But what's he to do when instead of waking up in his tomb in a pyramid in the middle of Egypt, he finds himself in a museum in New York without the canopic jars filled with his organs in sight?First of all, I adoooooore Amon. I love him so fucking much. He was so stiff and so formal and so clueless and so fricking adorable all at the same time. I loved how he was portrayed here. I loved how he found the new world so intriguing and so scary and so curious, how he was so intent on fulfilling his mission, how he saw the grander scheme of things and set aside his own wants and needs because the rest of the world had to come first. And did I mention how he was clueless AND adorable? And how he was just so effortlessly hilarious?!?!Oh lawd, Amon. *cackles with laughter*WHY. ARE. YOU. SO. FRIGGING. CUTE.I can't.Goddamnit, Amon! You're making it hard not to love you here!And he even has two other brothers, y'all. TWO OTHER BROTHERS WHO ARE EQUALLY CHARMING, FUNNY, AND SO, SO, SO ENDEARING. (PS: You can breath, guys. No love triangle over here, don't worry. Bro's code, yes? ;D)And I have nothing but love for the heroine, american Lillian Young who accidentally stumbled upon Amon as he awakened and got herself bound to him against her will (well, when you don't see your organs and you're weak as hell and you need the strength to save the world from a crazy-ass god and you see this life form in front of you who can share her energy... weeeell...). She was such a thinking heroine who was a trooper through and through. She would pause and look at a situation calculatingly. She never, ever became stupid or reckless or hopelessly in love. She never followed the hero because he was handsome as fuck (even though he was handsome as fuck), but because she felt that she had to help him because, well, if she didn't, it would be "bye-bye world, it was nice living here while it lasted." And yes, she may have been bitten by demon lizards, gotten herself almost killed by a risen dead, and gotten herself almost killed by a poison that was last seen since ancient egyptian times, but it was never because of her own recklessness. These were things that unfortunately happened to her and she fought and endured them like the rockstar she was.And that romance... that slow-and-steady romance that left me swooning and crying and laughing. It was a perfection and a tragedy at the same time. Needless to say, my heart is still recovering from the shock and awesomness and I absolutely implore Colleen Houck to write the second book soon before it dies in anticipation.My message to this book:My message to you, readers:It was amazing. You must get this.
What do You think about Reawakened (2015)?
Reawakened, with it's gorgeous cover and promise of Egyptian mythology, lured me in earlier this year. I had high expectations before I took a plunge into Reawakened, but this book exceeded every single one of my expectations. Reawakened is one of my favorite reads of 2015 and I have no doubt that many others will also find a new favorite in it.What made Reawakened a winner for me were the engaging characters. Both Lily and Amon were characters that I got to know through and through while I was reading the book. Colleen Houck's character development was remarkable and was a sign of how good an author she is. Lily's growth was especially conspicuous in Reawakened. She has always been the kind of girl who abode by every rule that her parents put up in front of her, never once disappointing them. She was studious, had never been in a relationship and was an all-around good girl. Throughout the story, she finally began to shed her skin and expose her true nature, allowing her more adventurous, spontaneous and rebellious side to emerge. I loved watching her finally do things that she wanted to do by her own volition instead of what her parents wanted to do. In Reawakened, Lily faced quite the hurdles and she did find herself needing to be saved frequently, but that doesn't mean she was a damsel-in-distress. She did try to get herself out of the situations she found herself in, but because she was only human, she couldn't always battle with the supernatural creatures. I found this to be very realistic. More than I loved Lily, however, I loved Amon. This boy! If I wanted to, my review would probably be just a gush-fest about how much I adored this Egyptian prince and his hilarious self. Amon and his cluelessness stole my heart entirely. He was a fun loving, charming and endearing character. I'll bet you money that you'll have a hard time not falling for Amon. Later on in the book, we also meet Amon's brothers who were just as loveable and funny as Amon. I also loved the bond of kinship that existed between these brothers and how loyal and protective they were of each other. I'm looking forward to reuniting with them again in the next installment.While Reawakened started off a bit slow with Amon waking up in NYC and experiencing culture shock, the book picked up towards the second half. Despite the slow start, the book was never boring or never did I feel like the plot was dragging. The characters, their banter and their antics made up for an entertaining read. I admit that I did enjoy the fast-paced and more energetic nature of the second half more, but only because I love action in books like this one. The world building was also fantastic. I've been fascinated with Ancient Egypt ever since I studied it for a few months back in middle school. It was the first time ever when I became invested in history, so it's a topic that I'm rather passionate about. I'm by no means an expert, but I think the author did a great job with building up her world and fleshing it out for the readers. I loved learning about all the gods and the stories. It was all very interesting and engaging to experience as a reader. The romance in Reawakened was also perfect. It was slow burn and intense and I basically loved it with every fiber of my being. There was so much romantic tension between Amon and Lily and since their relationship had a forbidden aspect to it, it was even more romantic and powerful. The banter between them was funny and very sweet. Oh and their first kiss? Holy mother of swoon! Reawakened ended on a mild cliffhanger, but it's one that leaves you with a ton of excitement and a pretty vigorous need for the sequel.Reawakened was a great start to a series that I have no doubt will continue to be epic. It has an engaging storyline, loveable characters, rich and complex world building and a gorgeous writing style that will hook you in from the start and keep a strong hold on you. Don't miss out on this fabulous book!
—Nick
Even though I was very picky, wore only designer clothes, and had a monthly allowance bigger than what most people my age earned in a year, I was by no means a snob.Firstly: this book is a stupid, racist piece of shit. Secondly, it is a grand accomplishment that I could hate a character within pages of meeting her. Right after starting the book, I found out that our main character is rich, adored, and perfect. She gets straight As. She has parental-approved freedom to do whatever she wants. She lives in a fa-bu-lous *snaps finger* Manhattan apartment that never feels like home (;_;) There were definite perks to living in Manhattan, and even more perks to living in a hotel—like maid service, room service at all hours, doormen, valets, access to the hotel pool, the steam room, and the gym. Still, it was hard for me to think of this residence as a home.She has the financial means to do whatever she wants (a fact of which she blissfully and frequently reminds us). She gets straight As. She wears designer clothes (a fact of which she, again, frequently reminds us). She has been accepted to every single university to which she has applied. She has the ability to wander around the Metropolitan Museum of Art at her own will because her parents are wealthy donors. She is bloody fucking perfect. Whoop-dee-fucking-doo.Meeting the most perfectest Mary Sue in the whole fucking world. This is surely a fantastic start to any story.So there's beautiful, wealthy, perfect-in-every-way Lily. She spends her afternoons just chilling in off-limits (to regular middle-class folks) areas of the Met. While chilling in a closed-off Egyptian exhibition, she hears a weird noise and then a weird guy emerges from the shadows, and surprise, surprise. He's an Ancient Egyptian. He's gorgeous! HE SPEAKS ENGLISH!!!!!!!! He has green eyes, because that's so fucking common in Egypt. Who are you? I wondered as I studied the person, who was not a man and yet not a teen. He seemed…timeless. Hooded hazel eyes, at that moment more green than brown, beneath a strong brow pinned me with a gaze that was both intelligent and almost predatory. I felt like a mouse looking up at a swooping falcon, knowing death loomed but utterly unable to look away from the beauty of it.And he's looking for...jars! And without the jars, he needs...her! Oh my god, she is the only one EVAR WHO CAN GIVE HIM WHAT HE NEEDS!!!!!! *cough*Mary Sue*cough* “You do not understand. Without my jars I must share your life force.”Panicked, I spun and ran toward the curtain. But before I reached it, the lights went out and I banged my knee against the golden sarcophagus. Stumbling to catch my balance, I heard him coming toward me. “Come back, Young Lily,” he groaned. “I need you.”He needs her. He pursues her. He all but kidnaps her. Wait, he does kidnap her. But he's so....different, and Lily finds herself oddly attracted to him. I didn’t go for dangerous guys, especially bald guys wearing skirts who I couldn’t figure out. He was different from any guy I had ever met.This is called a no shit, Sherlock moment. He follows her. He stalks her. Gripping the balustrade, I closed my eyes, basking in the feeling and momentarily forgetting my surroundings until I heard an all-too-familiar voice. “The sun makes us feel strong, Young Lily. As I am bound to it, you are bound to me.”Though it was definitely strange and all kinds of wrong to find him not only in the building I lived in but also on the same floor and just outside my room, I was surprised that I felt happy to see him, crazy stalker or not.Surely Amon is the model of a perfect YA love interest.Do I need to go on?This book is culturally insensitive. It has The Last Samurai syndrome in which a white person swoops in and saves a culture about which they know nothing. It doesn't display anything true about the culture (in this case, Egypt) that it purportedly portrays. The "Egyptian" characters are exoticized and more or less whitewashed to a Caucasian ideal of what a foreigner should be. The characters gorge themselves on American food. Egypt is restricted to an "exotic" ideal, without a single mention of the current, dangerous, and politically unstable condition that the country is currently experiencing. It is the story of a rich white girl who, more or less, plays tourist in a foreign country and sees nothing of that country beyond the boundaries of her 5-star hotel room. Do yourself a favor and don't waste your money.
—Khanh (the Grinch)
See more of my reviews on The YA Kitten! My copy was an ARC I picked up at BEA 2015. WORST DECISION OF ALL THREE DAYS I WANDERED THE JAVITS CENTER.0 STARS INTO INFINITYDiversity Rating: 0 – What Diversity?Racial-Ethnic: 0 (portrayal of Egyptians is way too poor)QUILTBAG: 0Disability: 0Intersectionality: 0Colleen Houck is notorious for her previous series thanks to its White Savior commplex and her utter lack of research/respect for Indian culture and mythology, but when a book is just sitting on a table at BEA free to pick up, your fingers will get a little twitchy no matter the author’s reputation (unless their name is Kathleen Hale). BIGGEST MISTAKE SO FAR OF BEA 2015. Houck’s fans will call this “just fiction,” but no book is “just fiction” when it offensively misrepresents Egyptian culture, mythology, and people and readers think the bull she’s spouting is accurate when it’s not. Reawakened is full of holes, racial microaggressions, and just plain poor-quality storytelling.When the first chapter hands you the legendarily-clunky method of describing a character via them looking at themselves in a mirror, nothing good is going to happen. Houck’s writing style is as exposition- and cliche-heavy as I’ve heard. Lilliana spends her days living in upper-class luxury, taking taxis and sneering at drivers’ accents because she doesn’t want to use her personal driver, and being rewarded for her judgmental ways instead of it biting her in the rear end. Her dislike of girls is encouraged by a side character saying is even encouraged by a side character saying she isn’t “one of those dramatic young women vying for attention” (p. 40).She also has an unsettling habit of being right while being snobbish and describing things as exotic. A man leers at her and it’s always because the man is evil. It’s not paranoia or something only she sees because she’s a rich girl out of her element and has no respect for others. Nope, she’s just observant. People make snap judgments or get the wrong impression of someone, but not Lilliana! She’s perfect. I counted at least three times she referred to something as “exotic” and I’d rather not go into that word’s role in the fetishization of foreign people and things. Lilliana just isn’t the right female lead for this book.The right heroine? A homeless teen who sneaked her way into the museum so she could enjoy some art and be inside for a while. She encounters Amon the millennia-old mummy man, he binds her to him, and she accepts it because going with him and helping him stop Set from rising is a better way to live than how she’s living now. I wrote that fanfic in my head the entire time while reading because Lilliana doesn’t cut it as a heroine. My version would give me the benefit of never having to read “Young Lily” again–because Amon is foreign and foreign people talk funny, it seems. “A desert lily need not turn jealous eyes toward the common violet” is just one of many lines of Amon’s dialogue that made me cringe. His similarly one-note brothers Asten the flirty one and Ahmose the bland one were similarly bad.Houck’s lack of research into what she’s writing about is appalling. Let’s count the ways:**Amon says “the time of the pharaohs was after my own” (p. 33) and yet the city he was to be king of–Itjtawy–was itself founded by Pharaoh Amenemhat I sometime in 1970s BC. He wasn’t an early pharaoh either; he was part of the Twelfth Dynasty, so eleven dynasties of pharaohs and their families reigned before him.**Again, if he came from the time before pharaohs, he likely didn’t interact with the Greeks and Romans because they came in much later. Despite this, he uses the corrupted Greek/Roman names for the Greek gods instead of the Egyptian names he would have grown up knowing. Seth should be Set, Osiris should be Wesir (yeah, REALLY), Isis Aset, etc. (source)**Myths to do with why Set was so determined to put Osiris out of commission are all wrong. Reawakened posits through Amon’s expository storytelling that Set coveted Isis and wanted Orisis out of the way; in the actual myth, it’s a combination of jealousy and his wife Nephthys seducing Osiris to get pregnant with Anubis. Legends vary as to if she did it as herself or while disguised as her sister Isis. Either way, Nephthys is a nonentity when she has an important part in the relevant myths.**The way quicksand works here is the movie way, not the actual way. In movies, it quickly swallows you up no matter what you do. In reality, staying still and slow movements will get you out easily, but you can even walk over quicksand like it’s little more than wet beach sand if you’re quick enough.Houck seems to have no sense of where her story is in history and instead mangles history to meet her needs. What results is a bastardization of Egyptian myths into cheap CW-like dramatics and blatant historical inaccuracies. This would bother me less if I hadn’t already found readers who thought Houck’s version was the truth.When Houck plays with someone else’s culture, history, and mythology the way she does here, playing the “it’s just fiction” card doesn’t work. People are reading this book and thinking her utterly inaccurate, racist version of Egypt is the real one and that’s not okay. Writing about another culture means doing research and making sure everything is as accurate as possible so as to represent them properly. This doesn’t seem to be a concern for Houck based on Reawakened and what’s been said about her previous series.And all of this is just what I notice as a very privileged white girl who knows very little about Egyptian history, culture, and mythology. I don’t doubt I missed many racial microaggressions or moments of bad/absent research because there’s only so much I can see from my own point of view. (That and I gave up trying to do the research to prove things right or wrong after about 200 pages. One’s brain can only take so much.) If someone well-versed in all the above matters read this book, I’m certain they would tear it and Houck apart.Do not buy this book. Don’t read it. Don’t pick it up at the library. Don’t pirate it. Don’t borrow it off a friend who did one of the former. Just don’t get near Reawakened. We don’t need diverse books; we need good diverse books, and this book is far from being a good diverse book. It’s a slap in the face to all of Egypt and all Egyptian people.
—Paige (Illegal in 3 Countries)
