I received this book for free from Publisher in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Cleo’s precious mother is dead – and it isn’t an accident! The Pharaoh’s illegitimate daughter must flee the royal palace at Alexandria or be killed too. As her evil half-sisters finally usurp the throne, Cleo finds sanctuary within the sacred temple of Isis, where four years later she becomes initiated into the top-secret Sisters of the Living Knot. But now Isis’s power is failing, Egypt itself is in danger, and the teenage Cleo must prove her loyalty to her goddess by returning to the Alexandria she hates. Her task is to seek out the hidden map which is the key to returning Isis’s power – on pain of death. But will she be able to evade her horrible sisters and sneak into the secret archives of the Brotherhood of Embalmers? And will she rediscover dreamy Khai, the über-hot Librarian boy she met as she fled Alexandria years before? Cleo’s powerful destiny is about to unfold….

Gorgeous and evocative, Cleo imagines the life of the teenage Cleopatra before she became the icon we all think we know.

At the beginning, I didn’t like the book very much. I thought Cleo was a bit of a whiner. The evil sisters also begin rather one dimensional, ‘bad because they’re evil and want to rule’ and might as well have been the same person.


It got better towards the middle. The plot spices up. Cleo is under constant threat and those closest to her are far from safe. Her relationship with Charm, her slave, also made me warm up to her over time. Even the one dimensional villains developed a little and started to separate out. I felt that Cleo grew as a character. She stops asking ‘why’ and starts taking action. The scenes where she faces her sisters in political power struggles were among my favorite in the book, as we got to see Cleo take a few risks and stand up against evil. The main problem I had with this book was the setting (Egypt). It just didn’t feel like you were there. Or at least I couldn’t picture it. I wanted to breathe the desert air hahaha. Cleo was an okay book but I don’t think I’d read a sequel.