Laura Rose

This novel is written as a diary of Grand Duchess Maria Romanova, third daughter of the last tsar, Nicholas II, during the 16 month period between his abdication in March 1917 and the family's brutal massacre in the Urals town of Ekaterinburg in July 1918. The diary has supposedly been retrieved by one of the guards who reluctantly took part in the massacre and is now being interrogated by monarchist forces after they retook Ekaterinburg a few days after the killings. The novel is very well written, with a haunting literary quality. The first third of the book covers the five month period when the family was under house arrest in the Alexander Palace, and nearly all of the rest of it covers the three month final period in Ekaterinburg. The eight month exile in Tobolsk in Siberia in between is covered in only about as many pages as months, which seems rather unbalanced (though this was a relatively uneventful, peaceful and happy time for the family, devoid of dramatic incident). While the novel is clearly meticulously well researched in many ways, and the author has visited many of the relevant sites in Russia, it has to drop a point for containing a large number of spelling mistakes and typos - particularly egregious considering the author's great interest are the misspellings of "Feodorvna" for "Feodorovna", and the misuse of "Romanovna" (a patronymic) when "Romanova" (a surname) is meant. One of Alexei's attendants is also continually misspelled as Deverenko, instead of Derevenko (related to the Russian word for wood). These constant errors were irritating and this otherwise excellent novel was clearly not properly proofread.… (més)