Cleopatra Ascending

Gr 7 Up—There's something a little unusual about 16-year-old Rhea and her sisters. One's a witch, one a shaman, the youngest is a muse, and Rhea is the reincarnation of Cleopatra. This impacts her life very little, until a team of archaeologists closes in on the location of Cleopatra's tomb, and suddenly Rhea's life and liberty are in danger. Luckily, Mark Antony established an order of protectors for Cleopatra before his death, and Rhea's boyfriend, Slade, is a tall hunk of shape-shifting paranormal dreaminess who just loves to come to her rescue. Unfortunately, bad writing turns what could have been an entertaining story into a baffling muddle. The author often knocks her main character unconscious in order to change the setting or move the story along, and it is readers who may experience the disorientation that one might expect of Rhea in these situations. Certain words are overused to the point of parody-many characters open or close their eyes "slowly," and clumsy sentences are sometimes unintentionally hilarious. There is consistent confusion about how to form a plural possessive. It sometimes seems that there may be an actual story happening somewhere adjacent to this book, perhaps in the mysteriously named Other Realm(s) that Slade and Rhea's sister Leah keep disappearing to, and in fact the first book in this series, Shadow's Edge (Flux, 2012), was about Leah. Rhea's book, however, reads like a hasty afterthought.—Paula Willey, Baltimore County Public Library, Towson, MD