susieliston 's review for:

The Kitchen Boy: A Novel of the Last Tsar by Robert Alexander

1.0

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After reading several non-fiction accounts of the murders of the Romanovs I don't really have any desire to read a fictionalized account, but here was this book among my huge stack of unreads, and it's short, so I decided to polish it off. Slightly tedious and repetitious at first, it's just about the daily life of the family in captivity told from the point of view of a little boy working in the kitchen. Then we have the murders told in gory detail. So fun so far. The gimmick of the story is that the kitchen boy is now an old man, telling this story for his granddaughter into a tape recorder And he has a big twist for us. Then the granddaughter discovers another BIG twist. These parts are completely fictional. So what was the point? To say, boy would that have been cool if it was true? I just didn't get it.