Only two members of the book group have actually finished this book and of those that haven't not many felt they wanted to continue with it. Everyone found this book incredibly hard going, it was dry, confusing, and in fact we found that we didn't actually leanr that much about Cleopatra. The language used caused some confusion as there were highly intellectual words used in the same sentence as much more parochial words which we felt clashed a little. We honestly weren't sure what kind of book this was meant to be, was it a highly intellectual history book, or was it trying to be a little more readable. Whichever it was trying for we felt it definitely missed.
We were all very disappointed that we didn't learn very much about Cleopatra, at least nothing that stuck in our minds given the odd language and writing style. We felt that we learnt much more about the male characters in the book, and even about the people who wrote about Cleopatra rather than the woman herself. Some of the facts that we did read we felt were things that the author could not possibly know, and she had no evidence to reallt back up, for example the fact that Cleopatra only slept with two men. Cleopatra did come across as someone very suited to the age in which she lived, she seemed to able to do almost anything to ensure that her name went down in history and that she and her children survived.
Along with the confusion of everyone having the same name and also changing the year when it suited them we felt that having some kind of simplified timeline would have helped the reader get their head around when everything was happening and how things interacted.
Overall we gave this book 1 out of 10.
We were all very disappointed that we didn't learn very much about Cleopatra, at least nothing that stuck in our minds given the odd language and writing style. We felt that we learnt much more about the male characters in the book, and even about the people who wrote about Cleopatra rather than the woman herself. Some of the facts that we did read we felt were things that the author could not possibly know, and she had no evidence to reallt back up, for example the fact that Cleopatra only slept with two men. Cleopatra did come across as someone very suited to the age in which she lived, she seemed to able to do almost anything to ensure that her name went down in history and that she and her children survived.
Along with the confusion of everyone having the same name and also changing the year when it suited them we felt that having some kind of simplified timeline would have helped the reader get their head around when everything was happening and how things interacted.
Overall we gave this book 1 out of 10.
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