I should preface this review by saying: I *love* long books. My two favorite books - The Crimson Petal and The White and Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell - both have more than a thousand pages each. And I adored Margaret George's Autobiography of Henry VIII. History is a special pet subject for me, and in middle school I read everything I could about Ancient Egypt I could lay my hands on.

So why only two stars? This book had so much promise to be everything I adored. Yet, I still found it supremely lacking. For a Queen who defied her time's expectations, managing to resuscitate a failing empire so well that it could take on the might of Rome and barely financially feel the hit - for a woman who managed to have children with two of the most powerful men in Rome - why was Cleopatra so...just...boring?

Her narrative was painfully repetitive. Every time she saw Alexandria, she compared it to a jewel; Julius Caesar was slow in bed, as capable in the sheets as he was in the battlefield (but who was he leaving her behind to go sleep with next? A man?); and all the encounters with Antony made her wish she could escape her skin and have their souls entwine! It was as if Margaret George had wanted to drive certain points home about the way that Cleopatra related to these people and surroundings - but that, unlike people like myself, these feelings overall never changed. I have had boyfriends I would've told you three years ago I planned to marry that I can't stand now. Friends that were my "besties" for decades until there was betrayal on a side that created a frosty overtone that precludes us from being anything more than nodding acquaintances now. Cleopatra's relationships with people barely changed at all once she got to know them: Caesar, the perfect, elusive husband; Antony, the rollicking captain of a band of pirates (I mean Roman soldiers, oops); Octavian, the frosty blonde with a crush on Cleo herself. Instead of having these characters' interactions markedly change Cleo Philopater, George seemed hardly willing to find new ways to express the same impressions we'd already had.

And Cleo's narration was as dry as the sand covering the Sphynx! Pretending for a moment that this pharaoh on the run had time to sit down and speak with her scribes for what I would consider to be YEARS on end, instead of what George describes as a few short months while waiting for Octavian to roll into Alexandria - why would she take care to describe every detail of every gown, every single nuance of the landscape? Unless it's the daily travel journal of a scholar who has nothing else to do with his time, it's completely unlikely that so much detail could be lavished on simple affairs. I feel as if cutting some of the narration would have made this book more interesting - there's only so much about banquets and awkward love-making I can read and retain before I'm bored stiff. By about four hundred pages, I was counting the single-digit percentages I was finishing up. By the end, I couldn't take Antony's death scene and was praying for it to be over soon. (Spoiler alert: it wasn't.) Olympos' ending was honestly better than the rest of the book put together - his wit and reverence for the Queen brought a little breath back into this mummy of a novel.

The Memoirs of Cleopatra was honestly just okay. Cleopatra Philopater did not come to life for me; she was just as static as the paintings on the inside of a pyramid. I wasn't stirred by any of the major moments of the plot nor did I particularly care that almost all of the main characters were dead. For those looking for charm and wit in equal measure, I suggest Margaret George's Autobiography of King Henry VIII - and am hoping other of her books will match that tome's tone and not this one's.