His Majesty, Queen Hatshepsut

To be born Egyptian is immense fortune.

Hatshepsut, a thirteen-year-old Egyptian princess, doesn't feet that she is entirely fortunate. After all, she is a girl. She grumbles about taking lessons with her brothers. Why should she study reading and writing, literature, history, and mathematics? As a princess, she will never need to be skilled at these things.
But Hatshepsut little knows what life has in store for her. She will need to know all these things and more. By the time she is fourteen years old, she will be a wife, and shortly thereafter, a queen. The early death of her husband makes Hatshepsut Queen-Regent, ruling jointly with her husband's son — a son who is only a child, and the child of a concubine at that. Hatshepsut thrives as Queen-Regent, creating opportunities to act for the good of her people and the glory of Egypt. Yet she chafes at sharing her reign with a child. Seizing the supreme opportunity, Hatshepsut names herself Pharaoh, setting aside the young heir to the throne. She rules as King of Upper and Lower Egypt for more than twenty years.
Dorothy Sharp Carter's fictional account is based on the real life of the Pharaoh Hatshepsut. It is a fascinating story of a determined woman who defied extraordinary odds and ruled her people well,

A fictionalized account of the life of Hatshepsut, a queen in ancient Egypt who declared herself king and ruled as such for more than twenty years.

To be born Egyptian is immense fortune.

Hatshepsut, a thirteen-year-old Egyptian princess, doesn't feet that she is entirely fortunate. After all, she is a girl. She grumbles about taking lessons with her brothers. Why should she study reading and writing, literature, history, and mathematics? As a princess, she will never need to be skilled at these things.
But Hatshepsut little knows what life has in store for her. She will need to know all these things and more. By the time she is fourteen years old, she will be a wife, and shortly thereafter, a queen. The early death of her husband makes Hatshepsut Queen-Regent, ruling jointly with her husband's son — a son who is only a child, and the child of a concubine at that. Hatshepsut thrives as Queen-Regent, creating opportunities to act for the good of her people and the glory of Egypt. Yet she chafes at sharing her reign with a child. Seizing the supreme opportunity, Hatshepsut names herself Pharaoh, setting aside the young heir to the throne. She rules as King of Upper and Lower Egypt for more than twenty years.
Dorothy Sharp Carter's fictional account is based on the real life of the Pharaoh Hatshepsut. It is a fascinating story of a determined woman who defied extraordinary odds and ruled her people well,

Publishers Weekly

Hatshepsut, whom readers first meet as a teenager, barely endures the indignities of being an Egyptian princess. She detests having creams rubbed onto her face and feet and learning to read and write. Later she has to rule as a widowed queen-regent until her late husband's son can become king; but Hatshepsut dares to presume that she is to be the next pharaoh. She seizes power and spends the next several years ruling her people and defending her right to the title. In a wry narrative voice that engages the reader completely, Carter has given this distant forerunner of feminist ``can-do'' a life-size dimension and a fact-based reality. The years of being a princess up to Hatshepsut's coronation are exquisite fun; the locale is exotic and the era bygone, but she shares the concerns of most adolescents. The story lags slightly at times, perhaps because Hatshepsut is an adult for the greater part of the book, with concerns that aren't as immediately appealing as her youth and ascendancy to the throne. But this remains thought-provoking fare. Ages 10-up. (September)