When I have a screaming head and just need something easy to fight through the fog, very often I will turn to the 'My Story' series. It was one of my favourites when I was younger, and I'm still always happy to pick up new (to me) ones when I find them in charity shops. I do particularly like the subset of books that imagine the diaries of real historical figures as they are so often an imaginative way into what can be quite complex periods. I know very little about Hatshepsut, and so was intrigued to see what I might learn. The answer? Sadly, not very much.

Almost from the get-go, this felt very different in tone and style from the others in the series I've read, and it was quite jarring. While none of the books are written in the vernacular of the period in which they are set, all of them seem to carry an 'air' of the era about them. Not this one though. Contractions and modern language abound, with everything from Asha referring to her parents by the informal 'Mum and Dad' to her character being a parkour loving free spirit, and it just feels 'off'. 

Similarly, the majority of the other 'royal' books follow a series of real events in a fictionalised way. But in this case, other than her raising from Princess to Queen all of the events seem to be entirely fictionalised. I can appreciate that there is very little solid evidence to pin down specific occasions about which to write, but again it just makes the whole thing feel like an outlier in the series. And coupled with the characterisation of Asha and the rest of the Court, it just made the whole thing so much more difficult to buy into. 

One element where the pattern of these books has held up is the introducing a (usuallh but not always fictional) boy as a first crush, sibling or a close friend to act as a touchstone to the 'ordinary' world. I actually really liked the boy in this book, Rami, but he was criminally under-utilised. There was a great foundation for a sweet little relationship laid, but the structure of the book didn't give it the opportunity to really take off. And the name of the character was a bit misleading for someone who knows a smidge of Egyptian history (but clearly not enough) - his full first name is Ramses. So I was imagining this story would progress to his  going from a simple artist's son to marrying Asha and becoming Ramses the Great. Ah well; upside, at least this boy was still alive at the end!

OK, so I'm far from the target audience for this book and, if I were 10 years old again and had picked this up... oh, who am I kidding, I would have still looked at it sideways because history was my 'thing' even back then. But if I were a different 10 year old I probably would have taken it at face value and really enjoyed it. But as an adult I wouldn't be using this one to introduce a child to the history, and so as not to dampen the effect of the others I probably wouldn't add it to a child's bookshelf at all.