The Antiquity Affair
Though sisters Lila and Tess Ford were inseparable as girls, lurking in the back of their archeologist father’s lecture halls, making up adventure stories, and creating their own secret language, they grew into different women in the early years of the 20th century. Unconventional and spontaneous Tess hopes to follow their father to the Valley of the Kings, digging for Egypt’s tombs and relics as a rare female archeologist. Intellectual Lila, dismayed at the idea of relics being taken from their people and their native lands, wishes her father would stop his pilfering and return to a quiet academic life, one that would fit more with her plan to become a respected society wife. On the eve of Lila’s debutante ball, Tess is abducted, setting in motion an unexpected adventure that takes the Ford family across the sea to Egypt in a race against a mysterious cabal to find a legendary artifact called the Serpent’s Crown.
Authors Lee Kelly and Jennifer Thorne have written a rollicking tale replete with adventure, romance, mystery, and a sprinkle of the supernatural. The Antiquity Affair has been likened to Indiana Jones, and it’s an apt comparison, as both are rousing adventure stories complete with ancient mysteries, hidden tombs, harrowing mantraps and pitfalls, villains bent on world domination, and fabled relics of power. Unlike their on-screen counterpart, however, Lila and Tess wrestle more with the ethics of archeology in an era of colonialism. The Egypt they know is one of myth and legend; the modern Egypt they encounter, simmering with nationalist ideologies and intellectualism, challenges that expectation. The authors neatly subvert the trope of swashbuckling men and their archeological treasure. A fast-paced and entertaining read that I hope is not the last from Kelly and Thorne.
