The Awakening Aten

I'm fascinated by the Amarna period and live in the city where the artefacts from the tomb of Kha are. This is means I was more than happy when I read this book.
It's well researched, enjoyable and entertaining.
I appreciated the fleshed out cast of characters, the historical setting and the plot.
I look forward to reading other books by this author.
Recommended!
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.

I love anything and everything to do with Egypt so I was excited to read this book. The setting is beautiful, the characters dynamic, and the plot engrossing. I loved reading about Ancient Egypt. I hope to read more from this author.

I would like to thank netgalley and the publisher for providing me with a copy free of charge. This is my honest and unbiased opinion of it.

This was a fantastic read! I love learning about Egypt and while many of the characters are real historical figures, their personality, motivations, and desires are fictional. The author weaves a fascinating family saga throughout multiple generations of kings, queens, royal family, and commoners to give us a history that is rich and full of interesting people. I really enjoyed the way Morrissey weaves religion, political power, family and tradition into a seamless story told from multiple perspectives. This book is the first in a series so I'm excited that there will be more in the future.

This is a captivating and enjoyable book, the first book in a saga. It is partly historical and it gives you an excellent insight of the Egypt of the Pharaohs. If you enjoy reading historical novels and you are interested in old ancient culture, then this is the book for you. It is interesting and very easy to read.

The Awakening Aten is a sweeping drama centered on the Rise of Atenism and the decline of Egypt's old religion.

I imagine that Yuya himself was an Israelite Jew pressed into the service of the Hittite Army.

Aidan has done a huge amount of research within this novel, faithfully creating what is essentially a diary of daily Egyptian life.

My main point for improvement was that not much happened in between the novels, we were moving scenes from Kha's son, Djoser to see how he becomes a man and transition himself into a political life that makes GOT looks very amateur. Egyptian Royal Politics was so inter-wound with their tombs, you'd be hard-pressed to find another culture that puts so much emphasis on its tombs. Now I understand why Egyptians kept building them so much. The tomb was your way to the afterlife.

A word of warning, the action is meaningful enough with a battle with the Hittites, and Aidan produces a fantastic sentence describing the fluttering of the flag across the wind as bodies are piled onto the floor. He also shows how Egypt's royal monarchy falls in corruption as the High Priests are basically what caused Atenism to erupt. That was my general impression. But if the Priests of culture get corrupt, then people like Martin Luther did in Germany with raising his new Protestant religion. King Thutmose also doubts the nature of the Gods, for if the Gods are not controlling the sins of men, then what use are they? Could one God give all of that?

However, I disagreed with this point of view. The main point there should have been a character who worshipped the Gods but hated that the Priests had made themselves rich and corrupt. He would have a solid counter-argument to Atenism, arguing that it was the will of the Priests to choose. If the Gods created this world, then it was human will that led to wars and massacres. It was humans after all that split away from Ra from becoming too rebellious. If we see another character like this in the next novel, I will be pleased.

Many times I thought the author described too much effort into explaining a lot of detail about Egyptian life. While helpful, I felt this is a problem with historical fiction novels as authors have to often describe the details you don't know about. Aidan is an Egyptologist so that makes me envious of him. Although there were many scenes which dragged on, and it felt like a family drama sometimes. This is not a fault, this is more of the fact that you're describing an army scene for example. Aidan showed Kha on the chariot and then he's asking the Officer what an army is. The officer went into a lot of detail, but I would have wanted to see the descriptions of the Medjay Guard in an action for example. Rather than describing it. But how can you balance both of show and tell in a scene like this? Kha is a scribe and thus he's never heard or seen an army in his life. Now say you wrote a Napoleonic story, it would be much easier to describe French Bluecoats and the Imperial Guard marching onto the battlefield, drums waving, and their muskets glinting in the sunlight as cannons roar around them. Whereas say with an Egyptian battlefield, I would have wanted a more active description, more cinematic action, more details of soldiers crushing their clubs into each other.

My feedback would be is to balance between describing, showing and telling. Sometimes I felt it was more of a history book, so the pace was slow in between. However, in the next sequel, I would like to see more emphasis on more political intrigue, more maneuvering, more action and less describing and telling.

Overall, I'd give this 4/5 for a solid effort. Aidan has done more research than anyone ever could, and I think he's done more of a fantastic job with this novel. Although I would say that in the next novel he focuses the story in the Pendulum genre and make the story more important while keeping the main aesthetic of the historical detail at hand. If you like Egyptian court politics, and drama this is for you.

This is like Steven Saylor's Empire, only in much more detail.

Worth the recommendation and thank you, Aidan, for creating a work of art!

I usually don't read character lists at the beginning of a novel because in a totally fiction novel, they're meaningless until they actually do something and I regard it as lazy writing. This one was an exception because the vast majority of the characters are really people from history, even the cat!

By the time I got to Part One I already could see that the author had done his research, and that's a big part of what makes a historical fiction novel enjoyable to me. I especially love books set in Ancient Egypt and though I found this one a little slow moving, I enjoyed having that era brought to life for me from a different perspective than I've read before.

Part of me wants to give this an extra star for the historical research, but the dialogue is stiff and the story just doesn't flow well. Still, it's worth persevering.

Thanks to Matador and NetGalley for the Advance Review Copy in exchange for an honest review.

There's really not enough historical fiction written about Ancient Egypt in my humble opinion. Less Victorians, more Ancient Egypt please.

This is one of those books that I know is pretty good. It's decently written and the author clearly knows his stuff, but it just didn't grab me in the way I had hoped.

My main issue was the same issue I have with a lot of historical fiction where it seems like the author tries to shoehorn every piece of their knowledge on the subject into the story. It's interesting yes, but it distracts from the narrative. There's really only so much a casual reader needs to know about Granaries. There were times I felt like I was a tween again poring over a DK Eyewitness Book except this time there weren't any cool pictures.

The setting and historical aspects are very interesting but the characters didn't really engage me. They all felt rather same-y and blended into one. I also found the constant repetition of their names in dialogue really distracting.

Overall, I can't say there is anything really wrong with this book at all. The author knows his stuff, the story is interesting, Thutmose's cat is listed as a character...it just didn't float my reed boat.

This is the first time I’ve read a novel set in Ancient Egypt. The story takes us through the reign of successive Pharaohs and their Queens, including Nefertiti, one of the more familiar names from that era. The two main characters, historically based, are a Joseph-like commoner who rises to become Regent to a child Pharaoh, and a freed slave who is destined to be a famous tomb-builder, his work surviving to this day.

The lives of these two men, their wives, their children and their Rulers are vividly brought to life. Aidan Morrissey has clearly done meticulous research into the wars and the rituals of 1400 BC. Some of the battles and many of the rituals are brutal in the extreme. Ill-starred lovers and the life of Kings – Morrissey’s themes are, like those of GAME OF THRONES, grandly Shakespearean. THE AWAKENING ATEN would make epic and enthralling television. An exhilarating read, especially for fans of ancient history and legend.

This is a well written novel, from someone who knows the period, and which can be read on several different levels.
For the lover of historical fiction it is rich in detail, containing descriptions of real battles, military strategy and the forces at the command of the Pharaoh. Boat and tomb building and religious festivals are all accurately depicted.
For lovers of character driven novels, there are so many to enjoy in this book. The irascible Haqwaset is one of my favourites. His struggles, both internal and external, are well handled. Guilt and how it affects several characters in different ways is a theme throughout.
Kha, Merit, Djoser, Maiherpri and Nahkt are all well-formed and rounded characters, with Yuya a constant presence, both on and off stage, being the thread that binds the main protagonists together.
The story of Barratarna is brilliantly told and, although I despised him when first introduced, I felt his pain and suffering, sympathising with him and his plight.
Anyone interested in the religion of the time, or tomb desecration, will not be disappointed.
The historical notes at the end of the novel I found fascinating . It is clear the author has done his research. There is so much to admire in this novel. I thoroughly recommend it.
I am looking forward to the next book in the series.

Enticing Egypt: The Awakening Aten by Aidan K. Morrissey
Many, many thanks to NetGalley for providing me with an early copy of this text.
History was a favourite subject at school so I do enjoy a historical novel every now and then. Unsurprisingly history novels are very much of their time, so while there's always been an abundance of mediaeval set novels from the Victorians onwards, in the latter part of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries, given the interest in political structures and democracy, there has been a veritable flood of Rome-based novels.
Novels based in ancient Egypt however have fared much less well, I suspect the reason for that is that white Westerners mostly struggle to find some way of identifying with ancient Egypt. Off the top of my head I can only recall two novels set in Egypt, Ancient Evenings by Norman Mailer, and Sinhue the Egyptian, by Finnish novelist Mika Waltari. I would never recommend Ancient Evenings to my friends, I don't know what Mailer was on when he wrote it, but I wouldn't like to share that either. Sinhue, on the other hand, is a veritable classic and when I read it in high school I could simply not put it down.
The Awakening Aten is set in roughly the same time period as Sinhue, as its title indicates, in the time surrounding the reign of the heretic King Akhetaten (in the introduction the author informs us that the Egyptians never themselves used the term Pharaoh). This shared setting is no coincidence, Akhetaten boldly attempted to break with centuries of religious tradition and establish a new more streamlined cult of a single god rather than the confusingly multifarious deities traditionally worshipped in the land of the two Niles, thus the era has an enduring appeal to the modern mind.
The story begins with four men awaiting execution for different offences, an artist, Kha, a thief, Pernab and an exile, Yusuf (later Yuya). The story follows the fortunes and misfortunes of the three men once they manage to dodge their fate and their families which become inextricably intertwined with the story of Egypt at that time and that of the Royal family itself in a time of upheaval. This is an interesting novel because it is based very closely on archaeological findings, this has both advantages and disadvantages, the advantages are that you will learn a great deal about the Egypt of that time, tomb painting and architecture, religion, crime and punishment, the priesthood, military campaigns, the Royal family et cetera the disadvantages are that sometimes the book loses itself in description rather than advancing the plot. There are all some sequences of extreme brutality. Overall it was quite a compelling saga, although occasionally the characters sound very cardboardy, but be warned, it ends on a cliffhanger.

I was not able to download the book before it was archived. Sorry. Thank you for the opportunity to review this book.

The Awakening Aten transports you to Ancient Egypt in a well-written story that was captivating and kept me interested until the very end. Great job!