Child of a Dream

by Valerio Massimo Manfredi

Reviewed by Coral

Alexander of Macedon was born to a father determined to forge an empire and a mother who thought he was the son of Zeus. Determined to leave behind his own legacy, Alexander’s childhood and teenage years were forged by his parents’ tumultuous relationship.

Alexander the Great is one of those historical characters I love reading about; more often than not, though, the novels I’ve read have been disappointing.

I felt that the book’s characters were all just names on a page. There was no emotional connection to them; I wasn’t drawn into their stories at all.

The book felt weird in some places. It was supposed to be a re-telling of Alexander’s childhood and teenage years. But then there shouldn’t be places where the story has to flesh out events that happened years ago that it skipped over in the first place. As an example, we shouldn’t have to be told years later that two characters in Alexander’s life were also close friends, when there was plenty of time in previous chapters, set in the appropriate year, to make this clear.

As a personal bias, I always grade a book a little lower when Alexander and Hephaestion aren’t lovers. Their relationship in this book is more implied than explicit (and I don’t mean in terms of sex scenes) with only a couple of lines hinting that they might have a more-than-friends relationship. Contrasted to the amount of lines we got describing his relationship with two women, who as far as I can tell aren’t historical but original characters to the story and I was left disappointed on this front.

I was confused by the exclusion of Cassander from the story. He was also educated alongside Alexander at Mieza, I believe. And considering his later role in history, his exclusion was weird.

 Grade: C