A review by artemis
Russian Roulette: The Story of an Assassin by Anthony Horowitz

okay, at first i wasn't planning to write any reviews on the alex rider series, but shit. this is simply the best part of the whole series. i love yassen and this book contributed to that. before, he was known to me as an assassin with a weakness that is alex; now i know him as a man with a traumatic past that became who he is mostly because of not having another choice. because of the chain of downright unpleasant experiences that shaped him as a person.

i honestly didn't know what this book would be exactly about, and at first i was wondering why it started with yassen's (or yasha's…) childhood of all things. as i kept reading, it made so much sense. fuck. he really is so similar to alex but they ended up so differently. to think that if he was given opportunities, he'd never have to start killing. maybe he'd even still be alive. this shit makes me so sad to even think about. his life, starting in the very boyhood, was so damn unfair. he suffered through so much.

“The place of my birth had now become a sentence of death.”

the fact itself that it was just a kid who had to think this way is devastating to me.
and there was a parallel between yassen and alex that made me so, so emotional:

“It was surely the reason why fate had brought me here, and it no longer mattered if I lived or died.
I would kill him. I swore it to myself.
I would kill him.
I would kill.”

“Yassen shrugged. “I kill a lot of people.”
“One day I’ll kill you.”

once again, yassen and alex are so similar. but alex never kept his promise. never had the chance to. yassen did kill his enemy. maybe that's, at the end, why their lives went in such different ways. but even then, i wonder if it'll stay this way. with all the trauma alex went through and with all the choices he wasn't allowed to make, i wonder if there's a possibility he'll ever be more like yassen than he'd ever expected.

i still miss yassen. i could wish his life had been different. but it wasn't possible. so now the only thing i can wish is to get to know the rest of his story.

“The two of them had come from different worlds, but they had so much in common. At the same age, they had lost everything that mattered to them. They had found themselves alone. And they had both been chosen. In Alex’s case it had been the British secret service, MI6 Special Operations, who had come calling. For Yassen it had been Scorpia. Had either of them ever had any choice?”