အိပ်မက်ဆက်ကြိုး

by ပုညခင်

This story is based on blended legends and archaeological evidence excavated in ancient Pyu cities of Myanmar.

Genres: Historical

574 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2021

Reviews

[May Sun Aung · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like how the author connects the actual facts and findings of the ancient city of Beikthano to her version of the story of Queen Panhtwar. The author does not add fantasy to her story of Queen Panhtwar, like most authors do. She just crafted the story based on real facts. So, in here, we can see Queen Panhtwar, not as a powerful queen with supernatural powers, but as a brave young girl with strong will.

[Julie In Wonderland · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a fictionalised version of a mythical character in Burmese history- Queen PanHtwar. It is over all a good story if you read it as what it is- a romance novel.
But if you were looking forward to seeing Queen Pan Htwar’s ascent to the throne and her downfall come truly alive like I was, you would be somewhat disappointed.
The enormous tome is largely made up of the queen-to-be’s youth and her romance with the merchant Thin-Kha. Very few pages are dedicated to her rebellion and even that was basically served in a plate for her by the men in her life. We saw her make no grand strategy except for the dam thing. Everything was handed to her by the seemingly endless circle of good people around her.
This I take as an insult to Queen Pan Htwar herself. Real life Queen Pan Htwar would have to gone through a lot more hardships to be queen. She would have had to outsmart foes and competitors. Real life Thin Kha would have wanted the throne for himself as would the general.
Also I believe, to be a queen in the ancient patriarchal Pyu country, Pan Htwar could not be as pacific as this novel portrayed. It is the problem with Burmese authors sometimes. They seem to believe a main character has to be this perfect, selfless, noble person especially when they write retelling of legends.
Ma Ni Pan Htwar was human. She could be angry at the King who killed her family. She could want war for revenge. She could still be the legendary queen while still being imperfect.

This story focused on all the uninteresting parts of one of the most fascinating legends in our history.
Sure the romance was done well. I cringed a bit at the lucy and neo pet names. (Note: real life Thaw Naings would never give their victims the mercy of a divorce.) There are massive info dumps every two pages conveyed in the worst manner possible: in dialogue. The book felt preachy at times but I did enjoy some of the political lessons.

But all in all, a decent attempt to build a modern day romance story on the foundation of a famous legend but not one to reread time to time and pore over.

[Amaris · Rating 5 out of 5]

ပန်ထွာဘုရင်မသမိုင်းကို အခြေခံပြီး ရေးထားသောစာအုပ် ဖြစ်တဲ့တွက် ဗိဿနိုးမြို့ရဲ့ တိုးတက်ခဲ့ပုံတွေ ဗိသုကာအနုပညာယဉ်ကျေးမှု ထွန်းကားခဲ့ပုံတို့ကို လေ့လာရတဲ့အပြင် legend နဲ့ myth တို့ရဲ့ ကွဲပြားပုံတို့ကိုလည်း သိရှိရပါတယ်။ ဆရာမပုညခင်ရဲ့ အလွန်ကောင်းမွန်သော အရေးအသားများကိုလည်း ဖတ်ရှုရပါလိမ့်မယ်။

[Swan Htet · Rating 5 out of 5]

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[Ei · Rating 2 out of 5]

I like it