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ricardienne) wrote2011-04-04 07:25 pm
ricardienne) wrote2011-04-04 07:25 pm
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Book Review: Lily of the Nile (Stephanie Dray)
At last we are finally getting beyond Wives of Henry The Eighth Syndrome in YA historical fiction!
I've been preparing for months to sneer at Stephanie Dray's Lily of the Nile, the first book in a trilogy about Augustan-era daughter of Cleopatra Cleopatra Selene. In fact, I quite enjoyed it, and found it a much more respectable contribution to the (admittedly small) set of novels about Ancient Rome for girls. But -- a summary: after Actium, Selene and her brothers Alexander Helios and Ptolomy Philadelphus are captured, forced to march in Octavian's Triumph, and then made wards in the puritanical household of the princeps. Selene determined to be true to her faith and place as priestess of Isis and to return to her rightful kingdom in spite of her hated captors, but she has to decide how best to serve her goddess and her people in the brave new world of Augustan Rome.
To begin with, there were three surprisingly excellent things about this novel. First, magic/miracles/actually supernatural goings-on have a small but significant place, as I think they should in a novel about the ancient world. Second, the Romans are pretty unambiguously the bad guys -- brutal severe jack-booted conquering thugs -- but considered from a Roman perspective, they appear pretty acceptable. To be sure, Selene and her Alexandrinian-Ptolomaic background are made rather more acceptable to 21st century norms that they probably should be, but Tacitus would probably be disgusted at how sympathetically and eulogistically Dray portrayed Augustus! Third, this is (historical spoilers!) a novel about a protagonist who is forced to compromise in unheroic ways and who sacrifices (at times) her principles and her freedom for her security. Which is...interesting.
But Lily operates on a number of generic axes, so to speak, and they interact in strange ways. A part of this story is the story about the girl from a warm and temperate and tolerant clime forced into the hands of cruel and puritanical guardians -- think The Witch of Blackbird Pond or even A Little Princess -- who rant about Sin and Evil and won't let her play music or dance or wear bright colors or express her femininity at all.
It's also the story about the girl with a strong and personal faith in a miraculous and loving savior, forced to live among people who mock and persecute believers, but with whom she is anxious to share the truth salvation of her religion. Dray is pretty explicit about the parallels she is drawing with Christianity -- rightly so, I think, at least as far as the prevalence of mystery religions in the period. I've read the Christian versions of this story, however, and it's interesting that essentially the same story -- no longer popular among increasing modern discomfort with Christianity presenting itself as gentle and persecuted -- as Elsie Dinsmore. Only with Isis.
In another layer, however, it's the colonial story: a person who is derided as an immoral Other and who is tragically forced to lose/hide/change her cultural norms to comply with those of her conquerors in order to effect anything. Dray decided to go the route of "the Ptolomies are Egyptianizing and essentially Egyptian," and I was all set to sigh over that when I realized that this post-colonialism-inflected story might actually be a more important and significant story to tell than the story of a privileged Hellenistic princess who loses her royal autonomy. Nevertheless, there's a way in which this is A Little Princess: Selene may think of herself as Egyptian but she's the foreign dynast imposed by conquest in Egypt as much as Augustus!
I've been preparing for months to sneer at Stephanie Dray's Lily of the Nile, the first book in a trilogy about Augustan-era daughter of Cleopatra Cleopatra Selene. In fact, I quite enjoyed it, and found it a much more respectable contribution to the (admittedly small) set of novels about Ancient Rome for girls. But -- a summary: after Actium, Selene and her brothers Alexander Helios and Ptolomy Philadelphus are captured, forced to march in Octavian's Triumph, and then made wards in the puritanical household of the princeps. Selene determined to be true to her faith and place as priestess of Isis and to return to her rightful kingdom in spite of her hated captors, but she has to decide how best to serve her goddess and her people in the brave new world of Augustan Rome.
To begin with, there were three surprisingly excellent things about this novel. First, magic/miracles/actually supernatural goings-on have a small but significant place, as I think they should in a novel about the ancient world. Second, the Romans are pretty unambiguously the bad guys -- brutal severe jack-booted conquering thugs -- but considered from a Roman perspective, they appear pretty acceptable. To be sure, Selene and her Alexandrinian-Ptolomaic background are made rather more acceptable to 21st century norms that they probably should be, but Tacitus would probably be disgusted at how sympathetically and eulogistically Dray portrayed Augustus! Third, this is (historical spoilers!) a novel about a protagonist who is forced to compromise in unheroic ways and who sacrifices (at times) her principles and her freedom for her security. Which is...interesting.
But Lily operates on a number of generic axes, so to speak, and they interact in strange ways. A part of this story is the story about the girl from a warm and temperate and tolerant clime forced into the hands of cruel and puritanical guardians -- think The Witch of Blackbird Pond or even A Little Princess -- who rant about Sin and Evil and won't let her play music or dance or wear bright colors or express her femininity at all.
It's also the story about the girl with a strong and personal faith in a miraculous and loving savior, forced to live among people who mock and persecute believers, but with whom she is anxious to share the truth salvation of her religion. Dray is pretty explicit about the parallels she is drawing with Christianity -- rightly so, I think, at least as far as the prevalence of mystery religions in the period. I've read the Christian versions of this story, however, and it's interesting that essentially the same story -- no longer popular among increasing modern discomfort with Christianity presenting itself as gentle and persecuted -- as Elsie Dinsmore. Only with Isis.
In another layer, however, it's the colonial story: a person who is derided as an immoral Other and who is tragically forced to lose/hide/change her cultural norms to comply with those of her conquerors in order to effect anything. Dray decided to go the route of "the Ptolomies are Egyptianizing and essentially Egyptian," and I was all set to sigh over that when I realized that this post-colonialism-inflected story might actually be a more important and significant story to tell than the story of a privileged Hellenistic princess who loses her royal autonomy. Nevertheless, there's a way in which this is A Little Princess: Selene may think of herself as Egyptian but she's the foreign dynast imposed by conquest in Egypt as much as Augustus!