53 pages • 1 hour read
Isabel IbañezWhere the Library Hides
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Series Context: The Secrets of the Nile duology
Content Warning: This section includes discussion of racism, gender discrimination, and death.
Where the Library Hides is the second book in Isabel Ibañez’s Secrets of the Nile duology, following What the River Knows (2023). Both novels are set in the mid-1880s in Egypt and follow 19-year-old Inez Olivera. In What the River Knows, Inez travels to Cairo from her native Argentina against her family’s wishes after receiving news that her parents, Lourdes and Cayo, are dead. She evades her Uncle Ricardo’s attempts to send her home and instead joins his archaeological expedition to search for the tomb of Cleopatra.
On the way to the site on the island of Philae, Inez discovers her mother’s journal, which implicates Ricardo in her parents’ deaths, and she decides to stay to try to learn more about what happened. At the site, she butts heads with Whit, an evasive former British soldier employed by her uncle, with whom she also shares a growing attraction. One night, Lourdes appears and tells her daughter that she’s hiding from Ricardo, who she says is smuggling artifacts. She gives her daughter a scarf that can magically shrink items, which she tells Inez to use to hide artifacts from him.
