44 of 48 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Two lives caught up in revolution and repentance., April 20, 2008
This review is from: The Romanov Bride (Hardcover)
I confess, I'm a sucker for just about anything on Imperial Russia. It doesn't matter what the topic is, art, music, history, a biography -- I'm there. So, when I look at this novel and my experience of it, I have only myself to blame.
Robert Alexander's third novel, The Romanov Bride, takes the story of one of the more intriguing members of the Imperial Family. Born as a member of a minor German princely family, Elizabeth -- or as she was known to her family, Ella -- was one of the numerous granddaughters of Queen Victoria, and would loose her mother at a young age. She was also considered to be the loveliest, and had been courted for a time by her cousin, Wilhelm II. But her choice of a husband confused many -- the aloof, rather chilly, Grand Duke Serge of Russia. He was also one of the most unpopular members of the Romanov family, and would finally meet his end at the hands of assassins.
In his novel, Robert Alexander focuses on episodes from Ella's life that had profound changes on her -- a visit to an ailing family with her mother, the coronation of her brother-in-law, Nicholas II and her sister Alexandra as Tsar and Tsarina of Russia. Her marriage to Serge gets hardly a mention, and it's only when it comes to his assassination do we get to see anything of Ella herself. Then a few years later we have her making the choice that stunned her family and led down the long road to her martyrdom at the hands of the Bolsheviks.
And speaking of Bolsheviks, the other main character is Pavel, a very angry young man who decides to become a revolutionary. We watch as he gets involved with every single big uprising from the Bloody Sunday massacre in St. Petersburg, to Serge's assassination, to where he and Ella's lives intertwine. I've never before read such venemous narrative, and at times, it got to be sounding very much like propoganda, and not much like how a person could realistically be thinking.
Sadly, a lot of what would have made this book appealing to the reader and making Ella more interesting would have been some of the background of her life before Serge's violent death. It would have been interesting to see what had brought the two together, why she decided to marry Serge, the important role the two played in bringing about Nicholas and Alexandra's marriage. Instead, all of the glamour of Tsarist Russia gets dumped to the side, and all the reader gets is the grime and misery of life for the underclasses -- I think that the author forgot that the main reason why people read novels is to escape for a few hours and simply enjoy themselves.
And now to some of the major problems of the novel. For one, when Pavel speaks, it's of a very uneducated, rather naive, man who has the remarkable ability to be in the middle of the high points of the novel -- it stretches the credibility of the story, and counts as too many coincidences for me. Too, what bothered and distracted me the most was that the author used first person narrative for both Pavel and Ella, which tended to make the story confusing. Fortunately, this is a short novel, at just 300 pages in length, and I was happy to finally get to the end, a reaction that I usually don't want to have in a story.
Given the vast amount of new research available on Imperial Russia since the fall of communism, this could have been a far better story than what the reader was given. Instead, the author fell back on using flat characters, cut out huge sections of Ella's life, and then to add insult to the reader, decided to throw in a fictional character that was brutal and cliched. The readers deserve better, especially as Robert Alexander's first novel, The Kitchen Boy, was such an entertaining story.
Overall, just three stars from me. I would think that after two successful novels, the author would know better by now, but sadly, this was not the case.
Other books, nonfiction, are available about Grand Duchess Elizabeth Fyodorovna. Both of them are fairly well-written and to be honest, much more entertaining than this fictional attempt, and I would suggest them over this novel:
Elizabeth: Grand Duchess of Russia by Hugo Mager
Ella: Princess, Saint, Martyr by Christopher Warwick
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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Da, da, da!!, April 25, 2008
This review is from: The Romanov Bride (Hardcover)
I couldn't put it down - my only critique is that is was over far too quickly! Having read Mr. Alexander's first two books on the history of Russia, the Romanov family and the Revolution, I was excited when I stumbled across this title in a local bookstore!!
Although there is far more to the "actual" story of the Grand Duchess Elisavyeta ("Ella"), I felt like I got a real glimpse of a short period in her life and that of the other main character, Pavel, an uneducated, angry young peasant who joins in the revolution and becomes the reason why we even hear this story.
I love the way Mr. Alexander finds a new and interesting way to tell these stories - which have been written about over the course of history time and time again - but never with such an intimate voice. His characters bring you to the "front lines" of the story and there is always an "ah-hah" moment as to why this/that character is telling the story to begin with - whether it be the young man who prepares the meals for the royal family while they are in captivity (as in The Kitchen Boy) or the daughter of one of the most intimate "advisors" to the Tsarina (as in Rasputin's Daughter) - Robert Alexander finds that hook that keeps you on the edge of your chair from beginning to end!
Let's face it, in 300 pages there is only so much that an author can write about. As with his first two books, Mr. Alexander continues to write stories that are historically-based, but with that added bit of fiction, brings an otherwise stale story to life on the page! Can't wait for his NEXT book to be released!!!
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Realistic and moving..., May 7, 2008
This review is from: The Romanov Bride (Hardcover)
The fate of the Romanovs is a true tragedy and the story of Grand Duchess Elizabeth is one of the saddest of all. Robert Alexander gives us a moving and realistic version of Elizabeth's life in The Romanov Bride.
The Romanov Bride is told in two voices. The first voice is Grand Duchess Elizabeth (called Ella by her family). Born Princess Elisabeth of Hesse, Ella was the granddaughter of Queen Victoria. She married the Russian grand duke, Sergei, son of Tsar Alexander II and brother of Alexander III. The second voice is Pavel, a Russian revolutionary. The fictional Pavel came to St. Petersburg with his young wife. But instead of finding greater opportunities, he lost everything he cared about on Bloody Sunday.
In 1905, Grand Duke Sergei was assassinated. Ella sold her properties and her jewels and used the money to establish the Martha and Mary Convent of Mercy. The convent operated a hospital and orphanage, and Ella became a nun and served as its abbess.
Alexander creates a story where the paths of Ella and Pavel collide with tragic and lasting consequences. Ella will change Pavel's life in ways that he could never imagine, and touch his heart in the process. While not condoning terrorism, the author makes us feel sympathy for the tortured Pavel. The book is extremely realistic with Alexander using known facts and actual letters. However, don't read The Romanov Bride expecting a full biography of Grand Duchess Elizabeth. There is very little about her childhood, the royal family or the early years of her marriage. Since this story belongs to Ella and Pavel, most of The Romanov Bride deals with the period of time when conditions start deteriorating in Russia and unrest becomes rampant.
This is the first Alexander book that I've read, and being a big fan of Russian history, I now plan on reading his earlier works including The Kitchen Boy and Rasputin's Daughter.
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