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.