Crocodile on the Sandbank

⚖The case for it

Amelia Peabody inherits money, declines to marry, and takes herself to Egypt, narrating the whole thing in a voice so dry that readers name it before anything else. She and Radcliffe Emerson meet and immediately irritate each other, which readers compare to “watching an old movie from the 40’s with Hepburn and Tracy.” Peters had an Egyptology doctorate and the dig detail shows it, with readers reporting they “ended up with more enthusiasm for the subject too.” The comedy is physical when it wants to be, including a lecture derailed when “his jacket is on fire from his pocketed pipe.”

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

“The plot of this book is so slight as to be transparent,” and Amelia, established as the sharpest person in any room, takes implausibly long to catch up with what the reader has already worked out. The treatment of Egyptians is condescending enough that readers stop on the “cringy comments about the superstitious & uneducated natives.” Amelia herself reads to some as “too self-confident and aggressive for the period,” a 1970s voice in an 1884 dress. The Egyptology arrives like “showing up to a lecture ten minutes late,” and the opening “dragged on for pages and pages and chapters.”

— the honest librarian

6h

honest hours

9

sittings