Cleopatra's Shadows -Emily Holleman

Arsinoe, the bright and incisive eight-year-old daughter of King Ptolemy, awakes one morning from an ominous dream of statues weeping blood to find that her reality is even worse.  There's been a violent coup, and she is stranded alone in the palace, abandoned by both her beloved older sister Cleopatra and her indifferent father.  The new monarch?  Arsinoe's half-sister Berenice, who has seized the throne and now rules over a bloodthirsty royal court. Arsinoe's struggle to establish herself in this strange new world takes her from the palace to the streets of war-torn Alexandria, where she must cast off her childhood comforts, including her idolization of Cleopatra.  Meanwhile, Berenice confronts her own demons - her cruel, dying mother, a pair of fickle husbands, and the ever-present threat of her father's return from exile - as she fights to maintain power as the first queen to fule Egypt alone in a thousand years.  When their deposed father, Ptolemy, marches on the city with a Roman