Maria Dahvana Headley

Queen of Kings, the debut novel by Maria Dahvana Headley (Dutton Adult, 2011), tells the story of Cleopatra after her infamous suicide. The premise of the novel is that Cleopatra did not actually kill herself, but rather performed a ritual that linked her with the goddess Sekhmet. Though the world believes her dead, Cleopatra lives on and sets about getting revenge on those who caused her husband and children to suffer. Blending real historical events with elements of the supernatural, this book is a wonderful piece of historical fiction.

The book features nearly a dozen different point of view characters, including Cleopatra, the shade of Mark Antony, the Roman Emperor Augustus, and the Roman general Marcus Agrippa. Despite the frequent changes between the different points of view, the narrative hums along briskly, and it never feels overwhelming to deal with so many characters. Each character is written with a distinct and clear voice, and Headley juggles them all masterfully. All of the characters are also exceptionally complex, with their varied motives intertwining throughout the story.

As a former student of history, I really enjoyed the mix of history with the supernatural. While Cleopatra’s Egypt is not a topic I have studied extensively, I have always been interested in Egypt, as well as having a bit of background in the history of the Roman Empire. I frequently found myself wanting to stop reading to look up more information, in an attempt to determine what was historical and what was the author’s imagination, but the flow of the narrative was too compelling to allow me to put the book down long enough to do this research. Instead, I waited until the end of the book. Headley includes a brief afterword that details some of the interesting historical facts that she came across while writing the book, and a little bit of reading online cleared up some of the remaining questions I had about the history behind the story.

My only real complaint about the book is that when you have a large cast of point of view characters, some of these points of view will come from the ostensible villains. Although Headley did an excellent job of not vilifying any of the characters, there are bound to be some characters that a reader simply doesn’t like. I found myself less interested in the chapters when Augustus was the point of view character, simply because I did not find him to be a very sympathetic character. This improved as the book went on, but I feel as though I may have missed a bit by disliking him so strongly. (I also fully acknowledge that at least a portion of my dislike of this character comes from having watched the HBO series Rome several years ago.)

Overall, I very much enjoyed reading Queen of Kings. Most chapters are short, making this a great book to read if you can only fit in a brief period of reading each day. There is quite a bit of violence in the book, but the descriptions generally keep this from being too alarmingly graphic. Nonetheless, this is a book for adults to read, and I would hesitate to recommend it to teens or younger readers.

You can visit Maria Dahvana Headley’s website here.

Related stories on Nevermet Press:

Visit the original post, Clockwork Reviews: Queen of Kings by Maria Dahvana Headley, at Nevermet Press. Subscribe via RSS, Twitter, or Facebook.