What the River Knows

I'm not really sure what to think of this. It's all so inconsequent. For context, this book plays in colonized Egypt, in the year 1884. And the two character alignments are: good archeologists who want to preserve everything and thus have to keep it secret so future Egyptians can learn about it - and the bad people who sell everything they get their hands on. So this is superficially anti-colonialist, yet all the relevant people are Englishmen, Frenchmen or Argentinians. Only two Egyptians in the book have names, and they're entirely replaceable, with no plot relevance and no agency.

And the "evil" side who's illegally trading artifacts is so flat, not even the motivations make sense (if it's money then why did Lourdes risk losing her giant fortune to Ricardo???)