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A review by snowmaiden
Enchantments by Kathryn Harrison
3.0
I'd been predisposed to like this book because I spent my childhood reading and re-reading [b:Nicholas and Alexandra|133486|Nicholas and Alexandra|Robert K. Massie|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1333577599s/133486.jpg|2453716], just as the author herself says she did. Unfortunately, this fictional retelling of that story didn't quite live up to my expectations.
It's pretty common for people, including me, to say in their reviews that they liked the beginning and ending of a book but felt it sagged in the middle. Unusually, I felt exactly the opposite about this novel, which read like three separate books. The first is a straightforward story of how Rasputin's daughters came to live in the Imperial Palace after their father's death and remained there during the early days of the Romanov family's captivity. This part was fine, but I felt myself struggling to remember bits of Russian history that weren't explained very well, which broke the flow of things for me. The middle section consists of long stories told by Maria Rasputin to Alexei when he is recovering from one of his hemophiliac episodes. The stories exist in their own reality apart from real-life Russian history and are filled with magic-realism touches. I loved this part, which was very poetic and lyrical. The third section tells what happened in Maria's life after she was separated from Alexei, interspersed with flashbacks to earlier events. This section was really confusing and didn't really go anywhere or add anything to what we'd already read.
I'm still glad that I won the Goodreads First Reads giveaway that brought me this book, because it had some lovely moments, but all in all, it was not as good as I had hoped.
It's pretty common for people, including me, to say in their reviews that they liked the beginning and ending of a book but felt it sagged in the middle. Unusually, I felt exactly the opposite about this novel, which read like three separate books. The first is a straightforward story of how Rasputin's daughters came to live in the Imperial Palace after their father's death and remained there during the early days of the Romanov family's captivity. This part was fine, but I felt myself struggling to remember bits of Russian history that weren't explained very well, which broke the flow of things for me. The middle section consists of long stories told by Maria Rasputin to Alexei when he is recovering from one of his hemophiliac episodes. The stories exist in their own reality apart from real-life Russian history and are filled with magic-realism touches. I loved this part, which was very poetic and lyrical. The third section tells what happened in Maria's life after she was separated from Alexei, interspersed with flashbacks to earlier events. This section was really confusing and didn't really go anywhere or add anything to what we'd already read.
I'm still glad that I won the Goodreads First Reads giveaway that brought me this book, because it had some lovely moments, but all in all, it was not as good as I had hoped.