The Tsarina's Daughter

AUTHOR: Carolly Erickson
PUBLISHED: 2009
GENRE: Historical Fiction

Warning: Spoilers ahead!  If you don't want to know what happens... well, I was going to say skip to the end, but in the end I'll tell you not to read it, so it really doesn't matter much, does it?

When we were in high school, and I would drift off into my own little world, my awesome friend Jen would respond to the question, "what's up with her?" with this answer:

"She's recreating the Russian Revolution in her head."

The life and deaths of Tsar Nicholas II, his wife, and 5 children has long been a obsession of mine, especially the stories of the 4 beautiful girls: Olga, Tatiana, Marie, and the infamous Anastasia, long believed by many to have survived the massacre of her family.  For a long time, Robert Massie and I were very close friends.* I still have Anastasia, the 1956 classic starring Ingrid Bergman and Yul Brynner, on VHS.  So when I saw a fairly new novel about Tatiana, the second of Romanov daughters, I was all over it.  Unfortunately, Erickson doesn't seem to know what to do with the history she's been given.

Erickson's story is a what-if tale: what if a young grand duchess, long sheltered from the world, makes friends with a poor factory girl and becomes immersed in the poverty outside the palace walls?  And what if that girl somehow escapes the tragic fate of her family?  It's an interesting concept, and I have no problem with fiction that strays from the actual history.  If I did, I'd still be reading Massie instead of this.  But Erickson is so anxious to tell her story that she shoehorns the history into the story, making it seem out-of-place.  When Alexis, the heir to the throne is born, he is alive for only a few pages when Tatiana tells the reader that he has hemophilia, the bleeding disease that inflicted the inbred royal families of Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  There's no build up, no episode that introduces the disease, just he has it.  I half-expected her to give a genetic breakdown of it - "Alexia had clotting factor VIII deficiency, the most common form".** It's all very awkward, and it happens over and over.

Erickson makes her characters very unsympathetic - Nicholas is a whiny drunk, and Alexandra is disturbed.  For all her claims that she will protect her mother at all costs, Tatiana does little to aid her sick mother, and in fact seems to spend virtually no time with her.  Tatiana is too busy running around the streets of St. Petersburg unattended, or hanging out with Daria, the revolutionary living in the attic.  (Daria is the sister of one of Tatiana's maids, and is brought to work at the palace after she loses her job and her fiance.  But she also hates the royal family and actively campaigns for their overthrow.  And yet Tatiana lets her stay?  It doesn't make any sense until the end when Daria takes Tatiana's place and is killed along with the royal family.  And even then it doesn't really make sense.)

The basic premise is not a bad idea, but instead of working with what she was given, Erickson writes out her tale and then adds in bits and pieces of history when it's all over.  It would have been better for her to start with her own characters and let them act as they naturally would.

LENGTH: 352 pages
MAINSTREAM OR NOT: No.  It's historical fiction meets romance novel.
SO, SHOULD I READ IT OR NOT?: No.  She tried to force her story in where it didn't fit, and it's obvious.

*Robert Massie wrote a number of books about the Romanovs, including Nicholas and Alexandra and The Romanovs: The Final Chapter.
**I wrote a paper on the disease in a science class in college.  It was supposed to be about the genetics of hemophilia but turned into a dissertation on how the disease affected the fall of Europe's monarchies, which is how a history major deals with her 3 required science credits.