Great art and an attractive plotline, although with some substantial licences taken with the character of young Eleanor of Aquitaine (here an adolescent barely aged 15), like the relationship with Vicenzo and that gossip about her and her uncle Raymond.
She's portrayed as clever, proud, sensitive and fierce, but also selfish, manipulative and ruthless, a woman who toys with and then discards the men round her from her weak husband Louis to Abbé Suger, and who manages to put her sole clever rival, Dowager Queen Adelaïde, out of combat through sly manipulations. I am not sure this is an Eleanor I can sympathise with, nor particularly enjoy reading about, although she does have a lot of what I can recognise from the real woman from history. I think my issue might be with the detail that, although it's true that Eleanor was manipulative and could be unscrupulous as politics of the time often demanded of rulers, here she's made to lean more towards the femme fatale type of seductress that's quick to drop her clothes down to the floor at a blink. Yes, she was beautiful and surely played the good looks card as excellently as she played her heiress of a rich Duchy card, but from that to being sluttish . . . there's a broad gap in between. I'm not in favour of this tendency to portray women as being able to become great politicians only through using what's between their legs; it's tiresome and does a disservice to those few women who stood out in a world of men through the use of their minds instead.
I'd say this was a moderately entertaining story, but nothing that's going to impress and with few if any narrative highlights. Besides, I went ahead and checked the rest of the isues to see the timeline this graphic novel covers, and saw that it ends rather too soon, much before she meets Henri d'Anjou, a.k.a. Henry II, which is arguably the time she shone the brightest, thus leaving her best times out.