Mara, Daughter of The Nile

As the heroine of McGraw’s novel, 17-year-old Mara has been enslaved for as long as she can remember and has no clear memory of her parents. Nevertheless, she has unusual ambitions of someday winning her freedom and becoming rich and powerful enough to exact revenge on her cruel enslavers. A former master (a scribe) taught her how to read and write, and at the start of the novel, she is better educated and far more intellectually curious than her illiterate owners, whose books she steals and reads on the sly, risking a whipping each time. Because she is fed barely enough to keep her alive, she has become a skilled thief and can pocket honey cakes stolen from a baker’s tray with a magician’s dexterity. She is also a quick thinker with an ingenious, supple mind, and she puts her skills to good use when she is forced to act as a spy for two opposing factions of the Egyptian court. Her natural grace and beauty also help, as does her courage. Her most striking physical feature is her “lotus-blue” eyes, so uncommon in Egypt that her heritage, unknown even to herself, may well be foreign. Raised as an enslaved person without family or friends, Mara initially has no sense of community or political consciousness.