Cleopatra Rules!: The Amazing Life of the Original Teen Queen - Softcover

Vicky Alvear Shecter is the author of Alexandar the Great Rocks the World, a Junior Library Guild selection and a Voice of Youth Advocates Honors List selection for nonfiction. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

Gr 6 Up–Julius Caesar was “a player,” Marc Antony a “good ol' boy.” Caesar Augustus, once a “snot-nosed, knobby-kneed, pimply-faced peon,” presents himself as a “stud” after defeating Antony at Actium. Cleopatra started life as a “bookish nerd.” Readers are either going to love or hate the popped-up tone of this well-documented history of “the original teen queen.” Shecter packs it full of irreverent metaphors (“Egyptians believed that a soul without a body was like a hotdog without a bun”) and up-to-date recontextualizations (referring to the Donations of Alexandria: “Imagine the outrage if the vice president of the United States suddenly gave away parts of Alaska”). Short chapters with banner headlines every few paragraphs organize Cleopatra's action-packed life into easily processed pieces, and the slangy style may mitigate the effect of the unfamiliar proper nouns. Medium-size photographs of objects and images such as movie posters, book illustrations, and paintings proliferate, one per page. A modicum of pronunciation assistance is offered, but there is an unfortunate shortage of maps. However, sidebars with sometimes-silly factoids (games, cosmetics) help round out this view of Cleopatra's life. Respectably lengthy endnotes refer to an even-more-respectable biography–readers are pointed to Suetonius, Tacitus, and Herodotus as well as excellent modern works on the subject. Most importantly, Shecter addresses and questions preconceptions about Cleopatra that have proliferated throughout Western culture since Plutarch. Whatever one thinks of the style, the scholarship is sound: in this case, a spoonful of Pop-Rocks may help the Ptolemies go down.Paula Willey, Baltimore County Public Library, Towson, MD
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