"The Cat of Bubastes" by G.A. Henty

I read this for school; it's not a book I would have picked up otherwise.

Basically, it's historical fiction about the prince of the Rebu people, whose capital gets conquered by Egypt. The main character (Amuba) and his steward are dragged off to Egypt as slaves, where they're bought by Ameres (my favorite character!), the high pries of Osiris. Ameres has a son, Chebron, who's around Amuba's age.

The titular cat doesn't show up until about halfway through the book, when it |is accidentally shot and killed by Chebron|. He |freaks out about this. So does his dad. So does the populace, when they learn about it. Someone should have made| conciliatory potato soup or something, then it would have all been fine. As I remarked to my mom, |"I'm halfway through the book. The cat just showed up and immediately died."|

The first half of the book was frankly quite boring. Later on, once the Great Central Event happened and everyone started |fleeing for their lives|, it got a lot better.

 

I do have rather a fair quibble with this, though. (Warning: some unobfuscated spoilers ahead.) In the book, it's stated that the Egyptian high priesthood knew about God, and that they constructed the Egyptian pantheon as a way of compartmentalizing His aspects so the common people could wrap their heads around it. That... struck me as implausible.

But anyway, Ameres (Chebron's dad) was my favorite character. He's one of those eminently sane adults who I like so much in fiction. Actually, pretty much all the characters here are adults.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for violence; it's not really described much, just like "yeah we shot those guys" or "if we hadn't had shields, we would have gotten stabbed".

I had a hard time deciding whether to give this 3 or 4 stars. Eventually, I decided on 3, because if I hadn't been reading 30 pages a day of this for school, I would have been bored to death by the first half or so.

(Endnote: If you couldn't tell, this thing is set in ancient Egypt.)