It was interesting, but I found it very dry and hard to read. I couldn't read more than one chapter at a time... I guess I expected it to be more personal, more "novel-like", but it was kind of like reading a history textbook.

This book is thorough and well written, it's just not what I expected it to be. It reads more like a textbook than a biography.

Thought this was going to be a bit dry but it was enjoyable really enjoyed the energy the audiobook narrator had. I love Egyptian history and this will be a good one for my collection.

This took me a while to really get into - I'd say for the first 60-80 pages I wasn't even sure if I wanted to go on. It seems so disorganized in the way information is laid out first, going back and forth in time between her and her century's-old relatives and things that happened at the end of her life, oh, now we are at the beginning of her life. (It settles down in this regard after a couple chapters.) It doesn't help too that there is VERY little first hand aka verifiable information about her life, beyond the basics. It gets tiring to keep reading 'as best we know' or 'or it probably happened this way'. Why keep at it? Because the subject matter, regardless, is so so so fascinating. Not just in how she ruled and how much power she had at a time when very few woman were more than basic home makers but the way in which she lived, in regards to the opulence and how modern Alexandrian culture was in comparison to the rest of the world at the time. It's a fascinating peek into that world and that part was definitely worth the slog at the beginning.

3.5

To me this was pretty boring. There were bits that were good and interesting but a lot of it was overly described and tedious. Before reading, I didn’t know that the stories of Cleopatra was so flawed and mythic rather than factual. Some of the myth I knew (the myth that she was beautiful but was probably less beautiful than rich). I knew that she’d had kids from married men, Romans, but it seems she did it more for political leverage than love or lust. Just how bad she was treated by history was remarkable. It is hard to read a biography in which so little is based on fact but rather the opinion columns of history and myth.

What is known and/or generally accepted that she did accomplish for her country was pretty amazing.