This is a fascinating political read. It stitches together from sparse documentation, a picture of powerful women in a society where gender roles were not absent but fascinatingly different. For the premise and recovery of unnoticed information alone, the book is worth reading. It also leads to some important questions about how military genius connects with administrative genius and how characters that we are used to thinking of as singular Great Men are often only the most visible of a network of competent people.

Where the book becomes dry, it seems to originate from censorship of its topic matter in historical record. There are places with pacing issues, where the author seems to restate his thesis too much, for example, where the sort of juicy information that would spruce up the chapter is simply not present to include. The parts of the book where dynastic struggles and violent but incompetent men undo the work of and censor much of the memory of the queens are predictably dark and depressing. However, this falls in the middle of the book, not the end, and the read ends on an interesting and bittersweet chapter.