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

Written by Vicky Alvear Shecter

Narrated by Cherise Boothe

Good. Evil. Dangerous. Glamorous. Will the real Cleopatra please stand up? Almost everything we know about the last queen of Egypt came from her enemies the Romans. Now it's time to meet the ''real'' Cleopatra, a ruler more complex, brilliant, and powerful than we ever knew. Cleopatra didn't just rock the boat when she became queen at seventeen. She rocked the world with brilliant alliances that kept her in power and in control. When Mark Antony tried to put Egypt under his thumb, she negotiated for - and won - more territory than any Egyptian ruler had snagged in generations. Cleopatra didn't just play by the rules. She made them up as she went along. She bowed to no one, including Octavian the future Caesar Augustus who never missed an opportunity to pump out anti-Cleopatra propaganda. The queen of Egypt has fascinated the world for thousands of years. It's time to find out why. So, on your knees, commoner! The world's most brilliant and outrageous queen - Cleopatra VII, the last Pharaoh of Egypt - is about to make her entrance. Includes maps, endnotes, timeline, glossary, sources, and index.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 8, 2013
• ISBN: 9781490608778

Reviews for Cleopatra Rules!

[rosa.mill · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is a super personable biography of Cleopatra. It's written in a very friendly and appealing readable tone. I do think that some modern day slang and tech references were out of place and will make this book feel dated more quickly then it would have otherwise and I also think the notes section could have been set up a little better. I would have liked to read these notes at the end of each chapter but I didn't realize they were even there and read them out of place at the end. I really liked that they offered the Arabic prospective of Cleopatra and tried to offer reasonings for why the seductress angle became so popular.

[karenball_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

"Queen Cleopatra VII, the last pharaoh of Egypt, was in fact a brilliant, complex, powerful ruler. For twenty years she kept the world's greatest superpower from taking over her country -- a good trick when you realize it was during the time that Rome swallowed up countries faster than most teens use up text minutes." Julius Caesar is a "player", Cleopatra's siblings are "a nest of squirming, hissing reality-show stars", Mark Antony is a "Roman Redneck" and Octavian is a "snot-nosed, knobbly-kneed, pimply-faced peon who could barely hold a sword." Humorous, yes, but the tone makes the ancient history more interesting. This is thorough research into Cleopatra's life, disguised in a chatty book with short chapters, catchy titles and subtitles, lots of images of Egyptian artifacts, and other art (including movie character photos) portraying her. Anyone who blows this one off because of the style and slang is missing out on a stellar piece of research, which references the many different points of view from which Cleopatra's story has been told. Greeks, Romans, Shakepeare, and Hollywood have all told slightly different versions of her life, making her out to be a gorgeous babe, a "power-hungry witch" and a "weapon of mass destruction in heels." The reality seems to be a very intelligent mix of all of those things, given the evidence from Shecter's research into the events of Cleopatra's time. 6th grade and up.