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Cleopatra Confesses (2011)

by Carolyn Meyer(Favorite Author)

3.61 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

1416987274 (ISBN13: 9781416987277)

languge

English

genre

Historical Fiction

publisher

Simon & Schuster

review 1: I've read a lot--okay, practically all--of Carolyn Meyer's historical fiction, and I've always had a fascination with Ancient Egypt, which of course means that I have more than a passing interest in its last, famous queen. So when I saw that Meyer had penned her own version of Cleopatra's story, I was eager to devour it. And I was so, so disappointed. This book is just...odd, to be blunt. It is told from the perspective of the adult Cleopatra, her last confessions before she prepares to take her own life, but that is only relevant during the story's bookends. Since the body of the story reads exactly like the voice of the young Cleopatra, it's unclear why Meyer chose to tell it from the older perspective in the first place. This is a YA novel. As such, it is only to be ex... morepected that it focuses on Cleopatra's early life--her preteen and teenage years as a princess in the Ptolemy court. But the novel doesn't really know what story it wants to tell. It meanders through her teenage years, touching on themes and patterns without ever finding a purpose. Then, once Cleopatra passes through adolescence and into her young adult years, the story, not knowing what else to do, keeps going. At first, I was interested in this choice, since Cleopatra's early years as queen are not well covered in either history or fiction. But as Cleopatra gets older, Meyer's writing gets more and more distant (altogether, logically, the opposite should be true as the older Cleopatra's memories get closer to the present). Facts are related almost as dryly as they would have been found in a textbook, while Cleopatra's thoughts and feelings about events, her expectations, her strategies get hazier and out-of-focus. When she meets up with Caesar, this phenomenon only gets worse, as Meyer's determination to keep everything YA appropriate wars with the less than PG content of the life of this queen who marries her brother while becoming mistress to a powerful, older married man. Caesar is somewhat bizarrely presented as the love of her life, despite earlier foreshadowing of her romance with Marc Antony (Marcus Antonious here) and the fact that it is a Cleopatra still fresh with the grief of Marc Antony's loss who is supposedly telling this story. But even this "revelation" can't pump passion into this bloodless retelling that peeters out to an uncertain ending, with no clear reason why the older Cleopatra decides to end her story there, or any resolution to the earlier themes of the book. It's impossible to read this book without comparing it to the one written by Kristiana Gregory for the Royal Diaries line (a line to which Meyer also contributed several titles). While Meyer's version feels more anchored in actual history (although their depictions of the early years share a considerable amount of ground), and not being bound to a diary format means that Meyer can skip through uneventful years and cover more of Cleopatra's life, there is little doubt that Gregory's version tells a better story. The entire point of historical fiction is to transform names and dates into flesh-and-blood people and real, immediate events. Cleopatra Confesses never once achieves this. All of the characters are flat and lifeless, even Cleopatra and her family, although they are allowed at least the pseudo three-dimensionality of a frieze, instead of the painted wall of the rest of the players. Nothing leaps off the page. Nothing stirs to life. Instead of the last confessions of one of history's most intriguing queens, it reads as the rather halfhearted biography of a spoiled teenage girl.
review 2: Still debating wether this book deserves 3 or 4 stars.It was very entertaining, but as someone who has read about Cleopatra's life this book was kind of disappointed. My main problem with it was the fact that it focused too much on the early years of her life, in which nothing incredibly exciting or important (compared to the rest of her life) happened, only to skip at the end of the book to her death. less

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