I love this book. When I wasn’t reading it, I was thinking about reading it. The title is a bit misleading considering only one of the four POV characters is a wife of Alexander the Great, the others are the sister of one of his wives, his bff/male lover and his sister. Two of his wives do feature fairly prominently, but the third sort of shows up in the last quarter and doesn’t really do much (though that’s probably historically accurate).
The characters are dynamic with interesting personalities and show the varied sides of the Greek invasion of Persia. There are four POV character; Drypetis (youngest daughter of the Persian King), Thessalonike (Alexander the Great’s youngest sister), Roxana (I won’t say much about her position, it changes a lot and there would be spoilers) and Hephaestion (Alexander’s oldest friend and lover). Through this you get a view from the Persians, from the Greeks at home hearing about Alexander’s campaigns, as well as those directly on the battlefield.
My only complaint is that one of the characters seems to go from sympathetic to annoying and evil as soon as the other POV characters meet her and I was kind of sad over that turn.
Overall though, it’s a really neat look at a pocket of history and thrusts some really cool women into the spotlight. I highly recommend it.
Thanks for stopping by!
-Erin