Customer Reviews

The Hour of the Cobra

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Delightful! I purchased this book for my young teenagers and found that not only they, but I couldn't put the book down until the last page. The historical references were just enough for young readers to get a sense of ancient Egypt without being bogged down in minute and tedious details, but what impressed me the most was the relationship between the siblings in the book. For anyone who has fought with feelings of sibling rivalry, this is a must read.

I have used this book as well as its predecessor as summer reading for my 6th, now 7th graders and they are requesting the 3rd installment to be their 8th grade summer reading. It is a wonderful mix of adventure as well as history lessons that often go untouched in a normal classroom. I recommend this as a must read for Middle School students as well as their families. Maiya does a wonderful job capturing the time period along with the thrills of time travel!

If you have been waiting for a worthy successor to the time twisting novels of Madeline L'Engle, without the religious baggage that sometimes drag L'Engle's stories into the realm of preachy, you might enjoy Maiya Williams. Her children enjoy the wonders and paradoxes of time travel without being too much occupied with theology. Does anyone remember the novels of Edward Eager from the 1950s and 1960s? Those were frivolous entertainments with a group of siblings whoi honestly cared about each other, even when they were driving each other crazy. Ms. Williams gives us all that, and more. Eaxch one of her books is like injectine a whole library of historical information directly into your blood stream. Here you get the lives and loves of thje ancient Pharaohs, complete with some chilling scenes of imperial, pre-Cairo dynasty madness, as the children who went back into time into the French revolution, in Williams' previous prizewinner, THE GOLDEN HOUR, tumble back to a few decades before the birth of Christ. Cleopatra is a stunning queen, well aware of her own power, and she forms a good role model for our heroine Xanthe Alexander, who is mistaken by the "jewel of the Nile" for the reincarnation of a goddess. What a dilemma! The story gets more and more complicated as Rowan, Xanthe, Nina and Xavier realize that they have somehow stumbled into an alternate universe, where they daily bear the risks of running into alternate versions of their own selves! Plus, they must return to the scene of the crime (Egypt) in order to right things with Octavian. Kids who have seen and enjoyed THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT with Ashton Kutcher will thrill to this heady intellectual idea, for they find out that if you disturn one aspect of the past, such as killing a butterfly, it may mean that the future brings famines and earthquakes, metaphorically speaking. Some good comedy ensues in the ancient scenes, where the boys rebel against wearing the culturally approved loincloths of ancient Rome, referring to them as "diapers." They are being trained as gladiators, having adventures that would be denied to them in present day America, where boys are not exactly encouraged to do anything exciting except go to war overseas. Maiya Williams brings us right into the center of the action, a sort of Indiana Jones paradise filled with mummy cases and man eating lions, one desperate chase after another. And yet she never neglects the emotional core of the story, one in which sisters and brothers are constantly at war with each other, a loving war in which resentment, pity, and the golden rule are constantly shifting their priorities, like barber poles set up in a desert sand dune. These kids have spunk, and if you hate spunk, you're out of luck here. The rest of us will have a blast. If Nickolodeon or the Disney Channel really cared about kids, they'd be making mini-series out of THE GOLDEN HOUR and THE HOUR OF THE COBRA. I think these books would do well overseas, appealing to the same audiences world wide who love Tintin and Snowy. Here you get all that excitement and brain stimulation, but you get family love too--the one thing Tintin lacks. In the background is Cleopatra's love and rivalry with Octavian, a neat parallel to the modern day story. Xavier impersonates the god Osiris in one comical scene.