What the River Knows by Isabel Ibanez

Good title, pretty cover, meh book

Expected publication date: October 31st, 2023

Read: August 18th - 24th, 2023

Rating: 3/5 stars

Did I like it? No. Did I hate it? No. Is it bad? Yes, I think so. 

This book sort of glided by with very little emotional investment from me. For the record, I was trying pretty hard to give this book a fair shake. I had just had my expectations way exceeded by The Scarlet Alchemist, a book from an author whose work I had previously disliked, so I was like hey, maybe this trend will keep up. Maybe I'll like this way more than I liked Isabel Ibanez's debut.

Everyone is wrong sometimes.

What the River Knows is the story of Inez, an Bolivian-Argentinian girl whose parents are obsessed with Egypt and spend many months out of every year in Egypt, assisting Inez’s mother’s brother on archaeological digs. Despite how much Inez begs her parents to be brought along, they have never taken her to Egypt. But then they die suddenly, and Inez decides to disguise herself as a young widow and finally go to Egypt in order to find out what really happened to her parents. Through a lot of stubbornness and arguably bad decisions, she manages to convince her uncle to let her come along on an expedition, where she uses her artistic talents to help record their findings. There’s sort of a brewing conspiracy relating to Cleopatra’s tomb, and while she’s trying to figure out what’s going on, Inez is gradually growing closer to her uncle’s Hot Young British Assistant, Whitford Hayes.

Also, this is a historical setting - specifically, we’re in the 1880s - but it’s kind of an alternate history where objects imbued with magic exist and that’s more or less normal.

Maybe it’s because I kept my expectations as neutral as possible, but I didn’t dislike this book as strongly as I disliked Woven in Moonlight when I read it. So that might be a positive. However, I think this book is pretty bad. I think it’s a type of bad that a lot of people could have a lot of fun with, and I don’t want to discount that! But overall I simply think it was bad. I was only barely invested enough to wanted to know what would happen at the end, and when I did know what happened, I was just like, "Okay."

Kerensa, what was bad about it? Well, one thing that made it bad for me, personally, was the main character, Inez. One thing that this book and Ibanez’s debut have in common is that they both have very brash, headstrong, impulsive main characters. Inez is slightly less prone to super-cringy banter than what I remember of WiM’s protagonist, but she sure does love to rush into situations by herself, with absolutely no back-up! If there’s one thing Inez is good at, it’s snap decisions and trusting the wrong people. If there’s one thing she’s bad at, it’s critical thinking. It’s hard to like a character when you feel like she’s impulsive, naïve, and just kind of stupid, without much in the way of endearing or redeeming qualities. I didn’t particularly like Inez.

As for the setting, while it felt like Ibanez had done research into the history of Egypt in the 1880s and other details of the setting, her characters ultimately did not feel grounded in that history. This is true even when she gave them backstories where they had personal emotional connections to real historical figures. The way that they talk and act, and even some of the beliefs that they espouse, just didn’t make me feel like these were characters from the 1880s. 

Obviously, there are always questions with historical fiction of how much writers should try to be “historically accurate” versus how much they should modernize, because every modern writer will modernize to some extent. Here, it just felt like the wrong balance was struck. But since I’m admittedly very nitpicky about historical fiction in general, I admit that many readers probably wouldn’t be as thrown by I was by Inez’s uncle declaring that he believes in a fair living wage (I was 2 seconds from google searching if fair living wages were a common subject of debate in the 1880s, but then I restrained myself). And to be fair, I do think that there's leeway for young adult fiction especially to use historical fiction as a way to discuss current social issues instead of perfectly replicating period ones. If that was what was being attempted here, I just found it a little distracting.

More annoying were the ways that the characters would invoke the idea of restrictive social mores, and then simply ignore them. Inez will observe that it’s improper for her to be going around un-chaperoned, but then she keeps doing it, and there are virtually no consequences, outside of other characters being kind of annoyed at her for being improper. There’s no real sense that Inez’s reputation or social standing will suffer from all the scandalous things she does, and she kind of shrugs off the possibility as if it doesn’t really matter. She spends a good chunk of the book calling Whit “Mr. Hayes,” and then decides of her own accord that they’re friends, and she gets to call him “Whit,” now. He doesn't even want her to call him Whit! 

I guess my real issue here is, don't bring up the possibility of social disgrace if it's not something you're actually interested in exploring or worrying about. This is already an alternate history, so in theory it could be a version of the 19th century where it's fine for a young woman to do all the things Inez does. If you're going to say, "Oh no, I'm unchaperoned!" then maybe that should actually feel like there are tangible consequences to it? Even if they're acknowledged as being unfair consequences? I don't know, man.

Moving on. In general, I did not love the dynamic between Inez and Whit. I was sort of interested in the beginning, and I felt like they actually had pretty good banter and an interesting dynamic. But for so much of the middle of the book, it feels like that dynamic stagnates. There’s a lot of back and forth from Inez where she’s wondering if Whit likes her, worrying about him apparently being engaged, telling the reader that they’re getting closer without showing us much, and then wondering again if he likes her. This was not enough to sustain my already very mild interest. I got to a point where I was very ready for some real progression on either the relationship or the plot, and then nothing happened on either front. For like, a good chunk of the middle of this story, it felt like nothing was happening.

The conclusion was fine. I mean, it was very silly, but not much sillier than everything that preceded it, I guess. The twist at the very end was, as previously mentioned, a little bit interesting. But I won't be reading the next book.

Ultimately, I think a lot of people will probably have fun with this. Unfortunately, I wasn't one of them. I didn't hate it, but I'm left very...whelmed. Like her bestie Rebecca Ross, I think Isabel Ibanez just isn't for me.