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Plus, she practiced witchcraft. No, really. Off with her head! Class has left the building. Or at least the genre. Have ancient settings ever been more convincingly evoked? Desert sands engulf the passions of men and women who remain persuasively human. Yet this was an age of heroes. The plot does not lack for incident. Amid mounting tensions, the barbarian mistress hatches a plot against the unborn child of the royal bride. Shackled men are trampled by elephants, examples to a mutinous army.

All the ingredients of royal melodrama churn, from conspiracies and secret marriages to incest and matricide. The pot fairly boils over. As in some monstrous myth, the vengeance of the Furies spreads, not just through one accursed family, but to all. The hot Babylonian wind is scented with jasmine, and the torchlit night is full of cries.

Crystal Starr Light. But then we started doing the time warp and I felt I was really an anthology of various people who knew Alexander instead of a cohesive novel. Still some good characters, but huge leaps in time skipping numerous events. But the end was worst; large jump in time, summarizing events.

Full Review: Alexander the Great is dead this is not a spoiler , and the various men and even women who knew him or of him desperately claw to get on top of the pile and to rule over the massive Empire Alexander carved. At it's most basic, that's exactly what this story is, though there is far more going on that this one sentence cannot get into. I'm sitting here, thinking, and I don't even know how I would begin to do what Renault did.

So many people, all with different motivations and hopes for the kingdom, whether it be unification or just a small place to call his or her own. I loved the first half. Slowly, I'd been "getting" Renault and her craft as I've read through her Alexander the Great trilogy, and it was the first half of this book that everything clicked.

I loved the characters, the way the story flowed - everything. The problem happened as soon as we did the year jump. In previous books, time does pass, but it's nothing quite as jarring as seeing the big block letters " B. I think, in order to show as much chaos and all the different peoples' intricate plans, Renault felt she had to do the Time Warp. And I don't know if it quite succeeded. When you jump a year, there are things that happen - such a Ptolemy moving to Egypt and taking over governorship there.

This is something that is a given; the audience never sees it. And it feels weird that I should just accept it happened, when normally, this would be one more piece in the puzzle. In fact, I think Ptolemy in general gets the shaft because we hardly see him at all in the book. We have quite the build-up to talking about Antipatros' reign - and then fast forward to the end and boom, yet time for another power struggle! What about the politics in that year of his reign?

You cannot tell me that life was hunky-dory while he was ruling, that Eurydike and Roxane and Kassandros had just thrown their hands up and accepted his rule. These are just a couple of the instances where I felt that I was only getting a small, small snippet of the most "exciting" portions of post-Alexander life.

In many ways, it felt more like an anthology, a collection of short stories than a full-length cohesive novel. And really, the disconnectedness is what makes me rate this lower. There's still a mighty good story - I loved Eurydike, even if she was incredibly stupid at times - but it feels like excerpts of a story instead of a full blown one.

Coming to the end of this book, I felt kinda sad. I've been Buddy Reading this trilogy with my friend for over a year now, and it's sad to leave the fascinating and exotic world of Alexander behind. I have really grown to appreciate Renault and her way with words and history. To people who think all history is boring, lemme just say: If you find it boring, you are reading the wrong author!

This was an enjoyable run; let's do this again! The final and the most brutal part of the trilogy. What happened next was a vicious fight for the throne. Hence the body count.

And only Ptolemy wants to leave this fight and go to Egypt. Wise decision in hindsight. Interestingly, this violent novel had the best female characters of the trilogy. And all of them were mesmerizing to follow till the end. Mary Renault now joins Dorothy Dunnett and Hilary Mantel in the pantheon of great historical fiction writers. The difference? Renault jumps about a lot in time here. Of course her previous novels did this too — all of them were selective in their scenes, not comprehensive — but this time round Renault covers a much wider span of time, the events of thirty-seven years in total, a wider range than the first two books combined.

As a result, Renault ends up jumping from event to event, and some scenes, especially in the second half of the book, feel abbreviated, and the characters sketched rather than fully, immersively formed. That was my single major problem with Funeral Games. It was difficult to get into the story in the same way I had with The Persian Boy or Fire From Heaven , when Renault had to sketch the huge cast of characters that pop up over these thirty-seven years and resort to a tiny brushstroke here and there to try and convey much more about these characters.

It distinctly feels like a more coherent narrative. In the second half, where many more years are spanned and characters far apart in location, there is a greater degree of summarisation going on. A positive addition is that we get inside the heads of some of the people most closely connected to Alexander — family members, and the comrades who knew him the best. Through their eyes we finally see Alexander, how and why he was revered after his death, and how some who fought to carve up his empire for themselves failed spectacularly.

This was honestly one of the most catastrophic books ever. I don't mean it was bad, just that everything in it was awful. It's the final chapter of a trilogy that no one ever writes, the part, after the hero has died, where everything goes to absolute shit and everything he worked for and stood for disintegrates. I loved the afterward where Renault points out that she actually left out a ton of the murders.

The only one I noticed was Kleopatra's though because her storyline just stopped after Perdikkas's death. The worst ones were Roxanne killing the pregnant Strataira and the deaths of Eurydike and Ariadios. Eurydike was mostly awesome and so young, she was the perfect foil for Alexander who got near everything right and could see so far, while she was so sheltered even though her nature and nurture had set her such similar ambitions.

Her storyline was certainly the most well-padded out and engaging. Sign in to add this item to your wishlist, follow it, or mark it as ignored.

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Community Hub. My Funeral Home. Start your own funeral home business and whether it is the right fit for you. Build your hearse, transfer the remains, prepare bodies for burial, and make a decent income. Death knows how to keep you busy. All Reviews:. Popular user-defined tags for this product:. Is this game relevant to you? Sign In or Open in Steam. Languages :. English and 8 more. Publisher: My Funeral Home.