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Children of the Lion

by Peter Danielson

Reviewed by Coral


On the eve of being freed by their elderly master, Hagar and Shepset instead find themselves being confiscated by the Egyptian government and sold to Abraham. Now they will travel with Abraham, his wife Sarah, his nephew Lot and Abraham’s people as they seek out the land promised to them by Abraham’s god. Along the way, Hagar and Shepset will each face horrible trials. Can their strength keep them going?

Ahuni has been a slave for as long as he can remember. So when he is bought by the blacksmith Zakir, he cannot let himself trust the man’s promises of freeing and adopting him. Is there really goodness to be found in this world?

Belsunu is an old man searching for the son that was taken from him long ago. But, as his health his failing, will he survive to see them reunited?

This was a hard book for me to read. It took me nearly a month to get to the end.

I had read it once before, back in high school, but had never read the other books in the series. Recently I saw my mom boxing them up, so I asked to borrow them on a whim. This book was published in 1980, which is sort of my cut-off year. I usually find books that were published earlier have a lot of prejudices that make them hard for me to read. That was definitely true of this book.

I am also not a very religious person. I wanted to read this series in part because I wanted to see how the author (though I guess I should say authors) handled the subject from a more historical point of view. In the end I found the approach to the story interesting but not engrossing.

I have read a lot of books that have many different characters spread across different stories. The ones I like the most are when the various characters and storylines are, at least, connected to each other in some way (in George R.R. Martin’s books, for example, where all the storylines are connected to the same main war). For a good part of the book it seemed like there were two disconnected stories: Abraham’s and Zakir and Ahuni’s. It took too long for the stories to connect to each other.

In the end I was more disappointed in the book than anything else.

I am going to continue on with the series, though I may not make it through all 19 books before giving up.

 

Grade: C