What a beautiful story. 🥹 If you can, I recommend you read this as an audiobook. It might be my favorite audiobook narration ever.

I tore through The Safekeep. It creates such a specific, tense atmosphere that I kept meaning to stop and just... didn't.

What I loved most was the prose. It's sharp, controlled, and beautiful without feeling showy. Every sentence feels intentional, and the restraint makes the emotional undercurrent hit even harder. So much of the tension lives in what isn't being said, in what people avoid, conceal, or refuse to name. Highly recommend the audiobook, as well, as I think the narrator was wonderful.

The whole book gave me some of the same feelings as Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Not because they're the same story, but because they share that same slow-burn intensity, charged stillness, and sense that desire, resentment, attention, and power are all tangled together. It has that same elegance and emotional pressure.

I also really appreciated that the characters are genuinely complex. There's no clear innocent, which made the book feel more honest to me. Everyone is flawed, limited by their own wants and blind spots, and the novel doesn't flatten any of that to make things easier on the reader.

The ending also genuinely surprised me, in the best way. It's one of those books where, once you get there, you can feel how carefully the groundwork was laid all along. I already know a reread would reveal even more, and I love when a book pulls that off well.

I loved it: beautifully written, unsettling, intelligent, and emotionally precise. Definitely one I finished quickly and then kept thinking about after.

I was not prepared for how good this book was. I am stunned. Blown away. I was all of the things because this book was everything. This is my new 𝐵𝑎𝑏𝑦𝑙𝑜𝑛𝑖𝑎. Which was my new 𝐶𝑙𝑦𝑡𝑒𝑚𝑛𝑒𝑠𝑡𝑟𝑎…I may see an emerging pattern, here. For all I’ve seen the iconic imagery of Cleopatra, I don’t know anything about her, and I didn’t realize that history knew so little. I’ve never read Shakespeare’s play, and I’ve never seen the Elizabeth Taylor movie. I'm not even really aware of how many films there are about her. Is there a film where she isn’t played by a white woman? A GOOD film?

This is not a spoiler because it’s right there in the plot description, but this story is straight from Cleopatra's mouth. I loved this entire book, but the take on her final moments I want to read over and over again. I wasn’t expecting the last two or three chapters, and I absolutely love it when a book can subvert my expectations.

It’s a shame we don’t know about the actual woman, about her life and what she was truly like. It makes me wonder what will be remembered of all these people we deem important now, which celebrities or royal figures will stand the true test of thousands of centuries worth of time passing? It’s sometimes difficult for me to wrap my mind around exactly how ancient Ancient Egypt is compared to everything else in antiquity, but Saara El-Arifi somehow makes it feel so close, as if the history came to life with each turn of the page.

We follow Cleopatra as a young woman, through her adulthood and romances with Caesar and Marcus Antony, we see her as a daughter, a sister, a wife, and a mother. She is a queen and as such, the embodiment of a goddess, and I believed it. I believed every word of this story, as if El-Arifi reached back in time and became a fly on the wall. I’ve never wanted a work of fiction to be non-fiction so badly, this is a first for me.

If you love Ancient Egypt, if you’re at all curious about Cleopatra, or if you enjoyed the two Constanza Casati books I mentioned, do yourself a favor and pick this up immediately.

"𝐼 𝑤𝑖𝑙𝑙 𝑛𝑜𝑡 𝑏𝑒 𝑙𝑒𝑑 𝑖𝑛 𝑡𝑟𝑖𝑢𝑚𝑝ℎ."