“Song of the Nile” - Stephanie Dray

(Cleopatra’s Daughter book 2)

🩸SOTN continues the story of Selene, daughter of Cleopatra, and living amongst the royals in the Roman court of Augustus, perilously ever at the mercy of his whims. To an observer, Selene and her younger brother have acclimated to Roman ways in a manner that Selene’s twin brother has not. As Selene learns of her own political value, she begins to work out how to exploit this to her end goal of returning to Egypt as queen. 

🩸However it’s not merely a complex game of realpolitik that Selene is playing. She is caught between apparent will of the goddess Isis and her mother’s ambitious legacy. The 3 siblings each have forces of magic flowing through their veins, yet none has learned how to master that power. We get the sense in this novel, that Selene is altering her own nature to suit the competing powers  that govern her life.

🩸I found this novel to be tortuous on the whole. While I was intrigued about whether Selene would out-manueuver the Roman Emperor, overall SOTN is the story of two horribly traumatized teens playing at adults, in the court of a paranoid and petulant Augustus. I’m not sure I’ll pick up the third book in this series.