• KIYA: Hope of the Pharaoh

  • KIYA Trilogy, Book 1
  • By: Katie Hamstead
  • Narrated by: Dara Rosenberg
  • Length: 10 hrs and 59 mins
  • 4.0 out of 5 stars (273 ratings)

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KIYA: Hope of the Pharaoh  By  cover art

KIYA: Hope of the Pharaoh

By: Katie Hamstead
Narrated by: Dara Rosenberg
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Publisher's summary

When Naomi’s sisters are snatched up to be taken to be wives of the erratic Pharaoh, Akhenaten, she knows they won’t survive the palace, so she offers herself in their place. The fearsome Commander Horemheb sees her courage, and knows she is exactly what he is looking for…

The Great Queen Nefertiti despises Naomi instantly, and strips her of her Hebrew lineage, including her name, which is changed to Kiya. Kiya allies herself with Horemheb, who pushes her to greatness and encourages her to make the Pharaoh fall in love with her. When Akhenaten declares Kiya will be the mother of his heir, Nefertiti, furious with jealousy, schemes to destroy Kiya.

Kiya must play the deadly game carefully. She is in a silent battle of wills, and a struggle for who will one day inherit the crown. If she does bear an heir, she knows she will need to fight to protect him, as well as herself, from Nefertiti who is out for blood.

©2013 Katie Hamstead (P)2014 Audible, Inc.

What listeners say about KIYA: Hope of the Pharaoh

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    2 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Hate hate hate this narrator

I'm sorry it was so hard to get through the audio of this book. Great story but terrible narration, her voice was like a kindergarten teacher telling the story of Cinderella .

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14 people found this helpful

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Don't waste your time

Book was written for 7th grade level..

Narrator made me want to shoot my phone..

It horrid waste of time

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11 people found this helpful

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Eleven Hours I'll Never Get Back!

I am typically a big fan of books on Egyptology, however this one was painful to finish. The writing is juvenile, trite, and completely predictable. While the narrator's diction is fine, I found the tone of her voice very annoying. Though this is intended to be fiction, it is laughably unrealistic. It reads more like a fairytale meant for an audience of preteen girls rather than historical fiction for adults. Needless to say, I will skip the other selections in this trilogy.

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10 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Fascinating and engaging

In Kiya, Hope of the Pharaoh, Egyptian soldiers visit a Hebrew village to find a new wife for the Pharaoh. The Egyptians desire one of Naomi's younger sisters, but Naomi bravely volunteers herself in order to protect her sisters' virtue. When she arrives at the palace, she continues to show strength and bravery, as she stands up for the other wives and concubines, fights the tyrannical first wife, and stays true to her religious beliefs despite threat of death.

I usually do not read historicals, but I'm so glad I made an exception for Kiya. I was immediately fascinated by the world she created and rooted for her characters. I loved stepping into a different world and was impressed by all the detail, such as social norms, culture, food, clothing, and marriage traditions. However, a world is nothing without its characters, and this book has fantastic ones. Naomi/Kiya is a wonderful strong, female character. She is courageous, moral, and easy to root for. I also found the Pharaoh's character to be complex and fascinating. I expected him to be more of a traditional "bad guy" type, but he was very layered and unusual. And the love story between Naomi and Malakai was noble and heartwarming. When he told the story of Rachel and Leia, I admit to tearing up a bit.

I'm so excited to read the rest of the series! Well done Katie Hamstead!

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9 people found this helpful

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he was so nice even tjough he beat me

this quote was repeated again and again. how kind a husband he was. then he would beat her. you would think amazon would be more discerning than to normalize spousal abuse. the reader sounds like a child too and miises any subtelty.

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5 people found this helpful

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Really

The voice was childish and grating. I made it to chapter 2. Someone got paid for this??

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3 people found this helpful

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Horrid

I couldn’t get past chapter three the scenarios and conversations were so trite and phony sounding

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2 people found this helpful

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    2 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars

(Spoilers!) Not THE worst, but not good either.

"Kiya" basically reads like self-insert Egyptian fan fiction written by a 15 year old religious girl who also knows nothing about Egypt. So if that floats your boat, read on.

The main character is supposed to be perfect in that she is very smart and pretty and the favorite child and dedicated to her faith and self-sacrificing and everyone who meets her loves her and she wins over everyone just by being herself because she's "fiery" and she has a heart of gold and she never sins or whatever, but it translates into a character that is so obnoxiously idealistic that she leaps right over the border with stupidity and jumps straight to a level of incompetence that I've only ever seen in the federal government. In short, Kiya is the kind of character teenage girls create when they're daydreaming. I did it myself as a teen, and there's nothing inherently wrong with it, it just doesnt make for great reading for those of us that care at all about character development. She makes terrible, naive decision after terrible, naive decision. Legit at one point someone tries to kill her son and instead of - I dont know, ripping that persons throat out? - she just like...shoves the woman out of her room? Idk. I kind of blacked out after that.

Anyway, the villains are caricatures. The narrator's voices for Nefertiti and all the male characters are also quite annoying. These voices didnt do anything to help the dialogue, which really and truly sounds like it was written by an inexperienced writer who loves cliches and is sort of teetering on the cusp of a sexual awakening despite clearly being very sexually-repressed. Like, maybe their deep, dark secret is that they check out harlequin romances from the public library and have to hide them from their over-protective parents.

Despite all of this, I did finish it, so its not totally hopeless. It was interesting enough to make me curious to see how the author was going to manage to give Kiya her happily-ever-after, what with like four dudes in love with her or whatever, and how many people were going to die as a result of Kiya's complete idiocy. Though I just learned that this is actually the first book in what is - for some ungodly reason - a trilogy and unless I literally finish most other books, I will not be continuing the series. If you read mediocre fan fiction in your spare time and have 12 hours to kill, you may enjoy this book.

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2 people found this helpful

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DNF

Storyline was too juvenile for my liking and very lacking in historical research. The narrator needs to stick with tween books.

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    3 out of 5 stars
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Can't get to the story

The narration of this story is just awful in my opinion... over acted. I can't even get past it to find out if I like the story. I'll try reading it myself as it received good reviews for the story itself.

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