Customer Reviews

Lifelines: Cleopatra

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Beautiful and sturdy book that I would recommend to anyone. May be a little too advanced for children under 10 or so.

If you have a daughter and are studying ancient history, learning about Cleopatra is a must. She is the most interesting woman of her time. In "Lifelines: Cleopatra", Adele Geras tries to tell this story by following the life of a young girl who serves as a handmaiden to Cleopatra. The story about the handmaiden is well written and interesting in its own right. However, where I think Adele Geras goes wrong is spending so much time on the handmaiden and not enough on Cleopatra. Although she died young, Cleopatra had an intense life with many interesting characters and world shaping events. Fiona MacDonald's "Cleopatra-Queen of Kings" does a much better job of telling Cleopatra's fascinating story.

My daughter became very interested in the life of Cleopatra as we were reading a book about ancient civilizations, how their governments worked, why they worshiped particular images and gods, etc.

She thought Cleopatra was amazing because she was a very powerful woman who lived many hundreds of years ago, and so far in her schooling, very few women were spoken of as powerful leaders. So, we jumped right in and for Halloween, she dressed as a stunning Queen of the Nile, even though we realized the real Egypian Queen probably didn't actually look like Elizabeth Taylor:)

She was asking so many questions about how she became powerful, what did an Egyptian queen do in her daily life, in what kind of a house did she live, did she have a husband or children, and especially, why did she die by a snake bite. All the answers I found were very complicated and too academically worded for even a very curious and bright ten-year-old fourth grader. So...we looked on Amazon for a childrens' book about Cleopatra and found this great edition by Adele Geras.

The pictures in "Cleopatra" are fabulous! They are colorful and lovely to look at. The cover has a jeweled eye and is big and bright. It is written as diary entries in the voice of a young girl living at the time of Cleopatra and her family. We haven't been reading it straight through, and that is part of what makes it so great; book you can open to any page, or any particlarly interesting event, and easily find great facts written in a very engaging manner for young readers, (as well as their parents).

I highly recommend this book, it is worth very penny. It will hang around your bookshelf long after fourth grade. I, too, find myself curiously flipping through the pages and reading it with great interest.

This book was for a third grade project and was a hit with entire class. The teacher loved the book and borrowed it to use in her class.