Secrets of a Sun King: ‘THE QUEEN OF HISTORICAL FICTION’ Guardian: 1

Product Information

This book is a wonderful addition for any school to run alongside the teaching of Ancient Egypt in KS2. In terms of the characters, Lil was completely likeable and I loved her bravery and that it was her love for her family that spurred her on. It's a tightly-written and very conscientious book that naturally weaves so many themes into a fun adventure. A lovely, exciting story about the opening of Tutankhamen's tomb in 1922 that'll make readers feel as though they were really there.

And this is where Carroll subtly gets her message across: she encourages her readers to question people's concepts and notions of historical events. The cover comments compare it to a Michael Morpurgo or Eva Ibbotson book but for me it had neither the subtlety nor the plausibility of either. year-old Lilian is equally fascinated by the news but when a famous Egyptologist dies under mysterious circumstances and her grandfather becomes ill, Lil begins to believe these events are related and that there is a curse on artefacts stolen from the ancient Egyptian tombs. Lil's grandfather is one of these but he has learnt his lesson by being cursed for appropriating the jar).By having the children meet a local boy, she also hints at problems of colonialism, and with the help of Lil, Tulip and Mrs Mendoza she makes accessible the tricky topic of feminism to young readers; also, PTSD in veterans is also an issue. The narrative moves quickly, and the three main child protagonists—Lil, Tulip, and Oz—are endearing. I met her a few months before this book was published and she told me a little about her process for writing this book and how deadlines were helpful for her, which was really inspiring for me. Lilian expresses with an attitude more people should have had in her era but unfortunately didn't, that 'Being English didn't give me the right to sort out other people's problems, not when they could solve them themselves. Once told by poet Ted Hughes her writing was ‘dangerous’, it took Emma Carroll twenty years of English teaching and a life-changing cancer diagnosis to feel brave enough to give her dream of being an author a try.

I felt like I knew all the characters really well and therefore was scared, happy, anxious, and worried for the characters throughout reading this book. She follows her curiosity to the British Museum and then to her grandfather’s apartment, where she unearths a mysterious passage that turns out to be an Anubis-headed jar containing King Tutankhamun’s remains as well as passages written from the perspective of a young woman named Lysandra who was the Pharaoh’s close friend. Both settings are really well written and utterly immersive- I truly felt as though I was there in both of them- and while there`s a lot of descriptions the plot still zips along and every time I put the book down I always looked forward to picking it back up because the events in both timelines were so interesting. Set against a backdrop of post World War I, as well as women’s rights in the light of the recent suffragette movement, Secrets of a Sun King lends itself to history both recent and distant. Students use the focus text as a basis to develop their reading, writing and SPaG skills and engage with a range of comprehension and discussion based activities.

The story starts off in London 1922, Lilian Kaye finds a parcel on her grandad's doorstep with a note about a strange curse. Ezra told Lillian that the vase belonged in Egypt and unable to say anymore because of a sudden fit of coughs. Like her previous books, this is a story centred in history, but with a modern-day awareness of social issues like representation, colonial footprints, and cultural appropriation. She has also worked as a news reporter, an avocado picker and the person who punches holes into filofax paper. It takes the reader on a fantastic adventure all the way to Egypt itself, and explores some of the problematic elements of archaeology's past in a way that opens up discussions about colonialism for children well.

Usually with most history books, I stop halfway through but with this book Secrets of a Sun King it had history mixed with a suspenseful plot!To me, the plot started off quite slow but very quickly it became exciting and held lots of tension, making me want to read the next chapter almost every time I finished another. A bookish teen, he has the skill to translate a lengthy ancient Egyptian text overnight, something which a learned professor probably took weeks to do. Particularly vivid and evocative is the depiction of Egyptian rites for embalming and preparing a body. However, there are multiple other characters that have significant roles in the book but do not appear enough to be classed as main characters. I would recommend this book to fellow students not just as an exciting story but as something that can be used to pick out good language from.

However, since I'm not in the target age group any more, maybe I'm just being picky expecting that the writing appeals across generations in the same way that Morpurgo and Ibbotson do! Emma Carroll’s latest book was Waterstones Children’s Book of the Month for August 2018 and has been getting brilliant reviews.I liked all the characters in the story, my favourite part about the book was when you read about the Kyky.