The Romanov Sisters by Helen Rappaport - Review

Finished listening to //The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nickolas and Alexandra // today. Wonderful book. Really paints the lives of the sisters and their relationships with one another with precise and heartbreaking accuracy. If your information about the last tsar of Russia and his family comes from the Disney version of Anastasia (as mine does), //The Romanov Sisters // by Helen Rappaport is a must-read. I promise there are no singing gargoyles (am I confusing this with //The Hunchback of Notre Dame? Oh well, whatever) and the bitter-sweet love of family in the eye of revolution and war will captivate even novel-loving fanatics.

This book reads as a beautiful tribute to these amazing young women and their family, taking into account their weaknesses and foibles, while painting a realistic picture of the last Russian tsar’s dynamic family. Readers should not expect a Disney story in these pages. For all the joy and light the family experienced, dark days haunted them in the form of illness, uprising, untimely deaths, political turmoil and misunderstanding between them and the Russian people. There are few happy endings here, as the First World War washes away the ordered and more civilized days of a previous century.

The one thing that I found puzzling was at the end where the family is taken out and shot. (I’m not counting that as a spoiler, folks, sorry.) Everything else is covered with such thoroughness, and this is treated almost as an afterthought. I read/ listened to the book because I was unfamiliar with the history of the Romanovs and wanted to learn more about them as well as the four sisters, so I’m unsure about why there would be such an omission. It could be due to lack of records and personal accounts, and that would be totally understandable. However, nothing as such is noted in the book, and I find that one of its few weak points. It drums the family out of the house to a cellar and then cuts to the account of a young man whose father came home and told him the family had been shot.

As I was listening to and not reading the book, I missed exactly who this boy or young man was, and as such it’s an awkward transition in an otherwise thorough and completely captivating narrative. Since the author wrote this following another work, //The Last Days of the Romanovs//, a more thorough explanation may be found there, but the missing pieces here makes the end of the book somewhat of a let-down after the thorough descriptions of earlier days. But readers should keep in mind that this is a very small portion of the book, maybe five minutes of the several hours of narrative, and that it should not be dismissed merely for this fact, unless you’re a reader strictly interested in the last day of the family.

Last things on this book, I HIGHLY recommend the audio version. The narrator, Xe Sands, is fucking awe-mazing to listen to through some thirteen hours of all things Romanov. Also, the narrative itself is very engaging, unlike some nonfiction. The prose is crisp and concise, even as the lives of the subject feel brittle and measured. The author does a wonderful job of sketching each member of the family so that as the revolution approaches you’ll find yourself anxious for them, or at least I did. The pacing of this book is especially remarkable; I found myself swept up in events, holding my breath through tense moments, and breathing a deep sigh of relief if the person in question escaped danger. That combined with the voice of the narrator made me eager to return to the world every day, even as the noose tightened around the fate line of the family. Definitely a must-read of the year, nonfiction with an engagement level akin to thriller fiction.