The Seasonal Reading Challenge discussion

This is the discussion thread for the Summer 2019 Group Read The Woman Who Would Be King: Hatshepsut's Rise to Power in Ancient Egypt by Kara Cooney. Please post your comments here. This thread is not restricted to those choosing this book for task 20.10, feel free to join in the discussion. Warning- spoilers ahead!

The requirement for task 20.10: You must participate in the book's discussion thread below with at least one post about the contents of the book or your reaction to the book after you have read the book

FYI - this book is on sale for kindle today for 1.99.

This one was just okay for me. The author admittedly points out that not much is know about this woman who reigned as an Egyptian king. I found the first part fascinating but then it started feeling long. There was so much guessing in this that parts felt like it could have been a great Historical Fiction book. So I settled on 3 stars.

I have a book called Child of the Morning that is a historical fiction novel about Hatshepsut.I am going to read it for another task and am planning to read this one too. It should be interesting to compare the two.

I like to read all kinds of history, so this was a good fit for me. The book provided a lot of information about ancient Egyptian culture and politics, given that the events in the book occurred 3500+ years ago, and, as the author pointed out, there wasn't much in the way of a written record.

What impressed me was that Hatshepsut rose to power via her intelligence and political acumen rather than by force. The author hypothesizes that she was more interested in securing the dynasty for her family rather than for purely personal reasons. The fact that she didn't depose her nephew gives weight to that hypothesis.

A good choice for this task.

I found this book so painful to read. There was so much supposition and speculation that it felt like the author just made up her own story about Hatshepsut with a little bit of fact thrown in (and later in the book it sounds like a lot of the 'facts' were idealized by the ancient Egyptians to preserve them as they saw fit.)

Ceelee - I'll have to check out the book you mentioned, as I felt like this story could have been good as historical fiction!

I do not read a lot of non-ficiton. I do not know how books get classified as non-fiction vs fiction. I am surprised that this book is classified as non-fiction. I agree with SandyL that so much of this book seemed to be the author's invention and I thought that non-fiction books were more based in provable facts as opposed to hypotheses. I tried to find some peer reviews -- what do other historians think about this book -- kind of articles but I wasn't successful. I didn't search that hard, and I didn't look at GR reviews. I think knowing that historians in general are happy with this portrayal of Hatsheput would have helped me enjoy this more.

I don't think I'm going to give this book a rating. I don't enjoy reading non-fiction so my rating really wouldn't be fair or relevant.

I realize the author is an esteemed Egyptian Scholar, but there is not enough useful information for a more general audience to really appreciate it. In addition in Cooney's desire to only present facts which could be supported by concrete data, a great deal of the book is qualified by statements such as we don't really know, but we can suppose Hatshepsut did this, that or the other because it was the custom at the time which begs the question, Why didn't she write a fictional account based on fact? Her knowledge of her subject is admirable, but I finished the book with more questions than when I started, which is not my aim in reading nonfiction.

I listened to this book, read by the author, Kara Cooney. Kara Cooney is an Egyptologist and faculty member at UCLA in Egyptian Art and Architecture, according to her author bio. I trust that her research is solid, so there was a lot to learn about ancient Egypt. She was able to expand the very little that is actually known about Hatshepsut into an entire story about her life and times, much of it speculative, based on what is known about the culture of her time period. However, I probably would have enjoyed a good historical fiction version of Hatshepsut’s life a little more.

I visited Hatshepsut’s Temple on a trip to Egypt a few years ago, so I was particularly interested to read more about her. The temple is beautiful and looks exactly like in pictures, except a LOT of tourists. Due to a terrorist attack there in 1997, the tour buses have armed guards.

I love reading history and biography so that's why I chose this book. I really enjoyed the solid discussion of Ancient Egyptian society and culture as well as the author's rebuttal to assumptions made by previous generations of Egyptologists. However, as others pointed out, there just wasn't very much in the way facts about Hatshepsut herself so far too much of this was based on supposition and informed guesswork for my taste. I can feel (and share) the author's frustration that there just isn't much in the way of documentary evidence.

I really appreciate the author bringing this amazing woman to our attention, though, and I applaud efforts to seek out history's outsiders and bring their stories to the public. I just have the feeling that there wasn't enough information to fill a full length book about Hatshepsut. Perhaps if this had been a section in a wider book concerning several female Egyptian rulers ( a few others were mentioned in the book) it would work a bit better.

Ava Catherine

Unfortunately, I was disappointed in this book that I was eagerly anticipating because I enjoy nonfiction, biography, and especially Ancient Egypt. There are some factual parts in the selection that I found enjoyable; however, there is too much conjecture for a true nonfiction book. I got so tired of reading "maybe," "perhaps," or " I think." I also found the author too biased toward her subject, as if Hatshepsut never made a false move nor had any negative characteristics, which made Hatshepsut a flat character. Cooney seems to have attached emotions and feelings to Hatshepsut to combat this problem, but this caused difficulty with remaining true to the nonfiction genre. I agree with some of the previous members on this thread that Cooney would have been better served writing historical fiction.

I listened to this on audio and enjoyed it a lot. I was most impressed how much archeologists can find out after such a long time - exactly when a statue or building was demolished, when parts of it were put into a different building, when something was removed and so on. I also had a lot of fun entering into the speculations about Hatshepsut's advisers and her daughter (maybe she caused a scandal and Hatshepsut, being very pious, threw her out? :-)

At times, it felt a bit repetitive and some facts were more interesting to me than others. I rated it 4/5 stars.

I was disappointed with this book. For something classified as non-fiction, it had an awful lot of speculation. Since my school days I've loved learning about ancient Egypt, but I can only hear "maybe" and "I think" so many times before frustration will set in. I agree with Connie/Ava Catherine that it appeared Cooney had an internal bias toward Hateshepsut. There was plenty of talk about others, including family members, who did bad things but she never did. And aside from that, everything was just a guess as to what she did and felt.

As much as I hate to say it, since historical texts are dominated by male rulers and family members, there wasn't enough "meat" to warrant a separate book. Take out all of the guesswork and imagined emotions and include the historical information as a section in a book about either the time period or her family.

I enjoy reading about history, but this didn't turn out to be on a par with the best. I agree that it started to feel too long and I got bogged down a little near the end. The most interesting parts for me were about the daily life of ancient Egyptians and the things that were part of normal life for them, such as the constant presence of parasites (yuck).

I suppose this is just the latest in a long line of interpretations of Hatshepsut. This was touched upon but a little more about the historiography would have been interesting.

SandyL wrote: "I found this book so painful to read. There was so much supposition and speculation that it felt like the author just made up her own story about Hatshepsut with a little bit of fact thrown in (and..."

I agree. I think this would've worked better as a historical fiction novel. Then the author could speculate all she wanted and it would still fit.

This book felt too long. I didn't need to know every aspect of her life, from birth to death, especially since there is a lot of conjecture.

On one hand, it's amazing that we really know what we do about a queen who lived some 3500 years ago but on the other hand, this wasn't a satisfying biography because so much of the writing was speculation - "she may have", "we can imagine". I think the amount of knowledge was too limited to be a full book. Even the author seemed to agree as she continued on for a few chapters after Hatshepsut's death.

Bookwrm526

I really wanted to like this book, and it should have been in my wheelhouse, but I really didn't enjoy it much at all. The subject is very interesting, but as many others have said there was way too much speculation and not enough hard knowledge for quite this long a book! I completely understand the limitations that the author laid out in the introduction, and I understand the fascination with Hatshepsut. Had this not been classified as non-fiction, I might have enjoyed it more.

The most interesting part for me was the end, with all of the speculation about why Thutmose decided (twenty years after she died!) to destroy all of her kingly monuments. I do like that the author was able to speculate more realistic political explanations for a lot of the actions of the book, rather than relying on stereotypes and personal vendettas.

I stepped into this book after thinking about which of the three choices for Group Read I was going to re-read, as I had already read all three.

I opted for the nonfiction choice because neither of the fiction books caught my attention as re-reads. Actually, this one did not either, but nonfiction can be a good re-read if you choose to look for different things than what you as a reader first got out of the book. So I opted to go that way.

The first parts of the book were indeed filled with a lot of speculation. I pondered through those again, for I had decided to pay closer attention to the latter parts of the book which emphasiezed Hatshepsut's daughter Nefrure and her brother/husband Thutmoses III -- the incest is awfully complicated in this particular family. Thotmoses II became king after his mother/coruler (wife?) died and he established himself as a warrior-king, extending the empire of Egypt up into what is now Syria. His sister/wife Nefrure apparently emphasized her role as high priestess of Amon more than her role as queen. These were aspects of the book which I had not focused on before, and these made the re-read worthwhile.

But revisiting an old friend is always a good experience, even if one feels like it is a re-tread. Hatshepsut is still one of the most thrilling women I have ever read about, even if most of what we "know" about her is what we can imagine.

I found the content of this book to be interesting, but I kept being thrown out of the narrative by the number of times that the author felt the need to use disclaimers (perhaps, it is likely, may have, probably...). At times it seemed as though every paragraph had a qualifier. I found myself counting up how many times she qualified a sentence on a page. I think I would have appreciated it more if, instead of using so many different phrases for "perhaps", the author had simply said at the beginning of each chapter that the reader should understand that there isn't enough evidence but that she was giving the most likely hypotheses.
The example that sticks with me is when Hatshepsut was dying: On one page the author said it wasn't clear whether her daughter Nefrure was still alive, but on the next page it said that Nefrure may have been wailing and tearing her clothes, or she may have been stoical.

Like most of you, I was disappointed with this book and give it 2 stars.
While I appreciate that it's amazing that we know anything about a woman from so long ago, the little that is known means it didn't make a very interesting story. I ended up skimming through a lot of this. The most interesting parts were those about ancient Egyptian life in general; the illness, the child rearing.

Finally finished the book! I actually forgot I had chosen it for the Group Read this time! I love history and am fascinated with the ancient world. I know a lot about ancient Greek and Roman history but not much about Egypt and I found the book pretty interesting. Sometimes I felt like it was a but repetitive and "dry" but obviously the author used her knowledge of the Egyptian civilization at the time and gave us a long list of EVERYTHING that possibly could make an Egyptian sick or die. WOW! How did any of them survive? The family relationships got very confusing and if you didn't know much about the people who lived in that period, you might get totally lost. I thought it was interesting that they preserved the royal line through incest. I had never heard that before. So it is very possible that with her family tree, Hatshepsut may have been her own grandma! :) I enjoyed the information about what Hatshepsut's daily life might have been like, the food she ate, the clothes she wore and how she was educated to be a ruler with skills of knowledge instead of practical household duties.

I don't have a problem with all the speculation by the author. Almost all history is speculation to some extent and the Egyptians weren't as interested in recording the personal thoughts and feelings as they were in keeping a record of the "what". I do think that there is enough material that exists through archaeology that we can understand what life might have been like for people living at that time. We just don't know how Hatshepsut felt about her life and what was going on around her or her feelings about family and her role in society but there is a lot of evidence that gives us clues about the subject.

While I really liked the book, I don't think it is a good history that would appeal to the general reader. A person interested in the topic might benefit by reading it. THE WOMAN WHO WOULD BE KING is the type of book that sparks interest but is only a part of a bigger study so would definitely work on a reading list for courses in ancient history, archaeology and women's studies.