Review of "Realm" by Alexandrea Weis - a real Greec tragedy about Alexander the Great

"Realm" is the story of Macedonian king Alexander the Great who conquered Persia, Egypt and the known world all the way to India, seen through the eyes of his Persian-born first wife Roxana.

At first the novel gives the impression of a romance novel but that somehow does not work because I certainly did not like Alexander as he is depicted here. He lets his wife travel in the luggage train of his army and only occasionally visits her to have a night of passion and then leaves her alone for months at the time.

As most of Roxana's life consists on travelling with the army waiting for her husband, that part of the novel might be very historically correct but a bit boring.

The last half of the novel is more of a thriller and quite captivating. Roxana the Persian has to keep her son and the heir to Alexander safe within a turmoil of Greec civil war violence.

In my language "a Greec tragedy" is what is called a story with a lot of death and destruction and heartache and that is certainly the case here.

Wikipedia and the writer do not agree on events later in the book but I can imagine why the writer choose a more consious and thus dramatic event.

Due to the good last part of the novel a 4 starts out of 5.

It will be published May the 14th 2019. Mine was an ARC-copy I received for free and I was not obliged to write a review.



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