My great grandmother, collector of various tawdry and naughty novels, encouraged me, as a young teen, to borrow one whenever I visited, with the caveat that I was never to inform my mother of this particular reading habit. On one occasion, I grabbed this one. I'd finished it with wide eyes and was rereading it when my mom caught me, and forced me to throw it in the trash.
20 or so years later, I found myself thinking about the book, and found a cheap paperback replacement on amazon.com, because I was curious if it would seem nearly as meretricious with more years and experience under my belt.
It's, in a word, tacky. Keep in mind that it was written in 1981, when Egypt, the middle eastern social culture, mannerisms, and form of dress, seemed exotic. It has vivid detail of intimate acts that will likely still shock a person who is entirely vanilla. The language in general is dated.
The thing that makes me rate it as two stars? There's one portion in which the author is describing an intimate moment between the two co-protagonists, and she describes one as removing the other's underpants.
Underpants?
I looked up after reading that, and laughed out loud to no one in particular, "Really? Underpants?" The word was so out of place in the rest of the novel that I just couldn't get over it. Undergarments, underwear, panties, thong, most any other word would have sufficed.
So, the novel doesn't make me as breathless now as it would have in my youth, and the underpants thing forever put this into the realm of the silly, but aside from that, it's an okay novel, no better or worse than any other of its ilk. It's fairly progressive for its vintage.