{"id":1554,"date":"2014-02-15T19:15:18","date_gmt":"2014-02-16T00:15:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=1554"},"modified":"2019-01-14T16:22:44","modified_gmt":"2019-01-14T21:22:44","slug":"the-city-of-the-sun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=1554","title":{"rendered":"*** The City of the Sun"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>By Juliana Maio \u2013 \u201c<a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Cairo\" href=\"http:\/\/maps.google.com\/maps?ll=30.05,31.2333333333&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=30.05,31.2333333333 (Cairo)&amp;t=h\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"geolocation noopener\">Cairo<\/a> during the war was what Casablanca had been mythologized as in the eponymous Humphrey Bogart film\u2013a romantic desert crossroads of the world, of spies and soldiers and cares and casbahs and women with pasts and men with futures . . .\u201d (William Stadiem). So begins the epigram to Maio\u2019s thriller, her first book. She picked this less well-trodden geography and a pivotal time\u20131941\u2013as her setting. Rommel threatens the city from a rapidly diminishing distance and the Muslim Brotherhood and a group of dissident Egyptian Army officers threatens from within. With great potential for drama and the urgency of war, she places her two main characters, who are fairly well-rounded, and a second tier of less compelling actors. The writer relies too heavily on cliches\u2013\u201dhappy as a clam\u201d \u201clooking resplendent and every inch a woman\u201d\u2013that made me wince, but the storytelling kept the pages turning.\u00a0 (2\/15)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Juliana Maio \u2013 \u201cCairo during the war was what Casablanca had been mythologized as in the eponymous Humphrey Bogart film\u2013a romantic desert crossroads of the world, of spies and soldiers and cares and casbahs and women with pasts and &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=1554\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[40,126,32],"tags":[128,415,129],"class_list":["post-1554","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction","category-reading-2","category-thriller","tag-history","tag-thriller","tag-wars-and-conflicts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-p4","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1554","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1554"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1554\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7697,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1554\/revisions\/7697"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}