Anastasia
Anastasia is the princess no one needs: the fourth daughter born to an emperor without a son, and the only royal lacking a magical gift.
Until she collides with a young Cossack rebel, changing both their lives forever.
Damien is taken from everything he knows and raised as a ward of the Romanovs.
Anastasia develops a strange kind of magic shared only by the Black Monk Rasputin.
While her power grows in secret, boosted by forbidden contact with Damien, Anastasia makes a mistake with terrible consequences.
Fate grants her a single chance to set it right... but saving what she lost may cost everything she loves.
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Community Reviews
Where do I start?
OK, I have a lot of feelings after reading this long novel over the course of 2 months. I finally finished. I'm in a book hangover now that I finally finished.
I picked up this book from KU because the cover was princessy and fairytale looking, and even as a grown woman, I love to read this genre. Also, for decades I've been a huge Romanov buff. I was heartbroken as a college student around 1992 when the news broke that the bodies of the Romanovs were found in a Siberian forest and that the lost princess Anastasia didn't survive after all. (there had been a miniseries about her I watched as a child, based on the Anna Anderson fraud.) I've read a lot of fiction and non-fiction books about the Romanovs, mostly about the four sisters, ever since.
Back to this book. First of all, the good! I found this to be a beautifully poetic, romantic, magical dark fantasy with lots of bloody and breathtaking battles between good and evil.
The main conflict is based loosely on reality but then goes way off into fantasy-world. The controversial-in-real-life man, Rasputin, is made into not only a powerful villain, but he's-- get this-- a Vampire!
Vampire!Rasputin, (not the real-life Bolsheviks) launches his evil plan to take over Russia by acquiring a enchanted gemstone that gives him godlike power. But it's not the real Russia, it's 'Rusya', an alternative name for the alternative world. The royal Romanovs possess individual magical powers in this story. They're basically Wizards! Anastasia in the alternative world has powers that will help her fight evil (Rasputin) during the storyline, and she has charming animal sidekicks as well. And she meets a dashing, sometimes broody love interest, a Cossack warrior named Damien. And I liked the Damien/Anya romance, especially in the early stages as it developed from just young teens with a friendly rivalry, to a bonding soulmate love. (But later on, it went into some steamy territory that I wouldn't have minded for a purely fictional character NOT based on a real-life young person, but I'll talk about that later.)
Even though it was long at 800 pages, I forged through it for almost 2 months. It's not the length that bothered me. was the fact that it started out charming at first, very fantasy-like, a great escape from reality and what history fated for the tragic royal family.
Now here's the BUT- what I didn't like. Around the middle, it got darker. And darker. And HORRIFYINGLY darker.
There was a mass murder, which led to slavery and torture. Anastasia survives and endures it all with superhuman strength, and she is no longer anything like the feisty, cute child princess we meet at first. She becomes a slave, then a warrior and fighter.
Somehow, by some miracle, Damien shows up in the wilderness at the right moment and right place, and they reunite and escape together. Later, their relationship heats up and it becomes WHOA! - steamy at about the 80 percent mark. Much more explicit than I had imagined it would be from the reviews. After that is a whiplash of plot twists. Chapters and chapters of battles, blood, violence, time-travel dressed up in beautiful descriptions. I won't give spoilers, but I would say it's an incredibly satisfying end *for a fantasy book* with its multiple climactic events and a VERY beautiful last chapter, which was the escape from reality that I craved.
But here's the main thing that really, REALLY bothered me. I would have loved this book and praised it if it hadn't used real people. The heroine is taken from the true story of a real person who was killed just a little over a century ago. A real teenage girl. The victim of assassination. I've read enough about the real Anastasia to know that she was spunky and strong-willed, and like the author, of COURSE I wish she could've had the power to fight the murderers to save herself and her family. I can see why the author had this fantasy story idea and WHY she wrote this book.
But this is where fiction has to face the real world, in my opinion. Here we go.
The real, historical Anastasia and her three sisters were very innocent. They lived lives dictated by duty, public service, and *especially* Christian religion. They were raised in the Russian Orthodox faith. The girls' bedrooms were filled with crosses and pictures of saints. (In other words, they would have not imagined themselves as sorceresses or witches, because the idea would be downright SINFUL.) They were products of their culture at the time, proper royal Edwardian/early 20th century ladies. They did get a chance to see and talk to young men, because they nursed them back to health in the war hospitals. Maria was even said to have a crush on one of the wounded soldiers. That detail was even in the book for the fictional Maria. Anastasia was said to have played cards and games (even *gasp* pool!) with the soldiers, which was probably the most "romance" that the real-life teen got to experience. She was still just a kid who liked to take funny pictures with her camera and play with the family dogs. She even went to her death cradling a dog!
Of course, the real girls' lives were cut short by a squad of killers before they even had the CHANCE to have actual love lives with men. (With the possible exception of Olga (called "Ollie" in the book so as not to be confused with Aunt Olga. She was almost 23 when she was killed. Accounts say that she was seeing a young man with a lower rank while rejecting a suitor prince.)
So why all this? It bothers me that the book didn't take the life circumstances, facts, and the beliefs and wishes of the real Anastasia and her siblings into consideration when writing their fictional counterparts. The heroine is shown in several explicit sex scenes, and I just feel this sense of the book's disrespect for the memory of a real child who was killed while she was still a minor. Also, Alexei. He was a child killed at age 13, and I feel like it insulted his memory, too, to have his fictional counterpart drained of blood (especially because he had hemophilia in real life) and made to be a pawn of Vampire!Rasputin.
Those were the things that I really had trouble with. I guess you could compare Anastasia to Anne Frank. Would anyone think it's OK to write a fantasy story about Anne Frank, a believer in the God of Israel, as a "sorceress" with supernatural powers, who goes on to have a very adult relationship with her love interest (like that boy Peter she befriended) and have her counterpart be sexualized? Then have fantasy-Anne engage in sorcery combat with Nazi vampires? I didn't want to even TYPE that because I wouldn't want that story to be written. It disrespects the real child, Anne Frank, and her family. True, she didn't have an animated movie about her, which could've led to a book, but that's just too weak an argument.
In all, I just think this would have been better with the heroine as a completely fictional character, using different names with fictional history.
OK, I have a lot of feelings after reading this long novel over the course of 2 months. I finally finished. I'm in a book hangover now that I finally finished.
I picked up this book from KU because the cover was princessy and fairytale looking, and even as a grown woman, I love to read this genre. Also, for decades I've been a huge Romanov buff. I was heartbroken as a college student around 1992 when the news broke that the bodies of the Romanovs were found in a Siberian forest and that the lost princess Anastasia didn't survive after all. (there had been a miniseries about her I watched as a child, based on the Anna Anderson fraud.) I've read a lot of fiction and non-fiction books about the Romanovs, mostly about the four sisters, ever since.
Back to this book. First of all, the good! I found this to be a beautifully poetic, romantic, magical dark fantasy with lots of bloody and breathtaking battles between good and evil.
The main conflict is based loosely on reality but then goes way off into fantasy-world. The controversial-in-real-life man, Rasputin, is made into not only a powerful villain, but he's-- get this-- a Vampire!
Vampire!Rasputin, (not the real-life Bolsheviks) launches his evil plan to take over Russia by acquiring a enchanted gemstone that gives him godlike power. But it's not the real Russia, it's 'Rusya', an alternative name for the alternative world. The royal Romanovs possess individual magical powers in this story. They're basically Wizards! Anastasia in the alternative world has powers that will help her fight evil (Rasputin) during the storyline, and she has charming animal sidekicks as well. And she meets a dashing, sometimes broody love interest, a Cossack warrior named Damien. And I liked the Damien/Anya romance, especially in the early stages as it developed from just young teens with a friendly rivalry, to a bonding soulmate love. (But later on, it went into some steamy territory that I wouldn't have minded for a purely fictional character NOT based on a real-life young person, but I'll talk about that later.)
Even though it was long at 800 pages, I forged through it for almost 2 months. It's not the length that bothered me. was the fact that it started out charming at first, very fantasy-like, a great escape from reality and what history fated for the tragic royal family.
Now here's the BUT- what I didn't like. Around the middle, it got darker. And darker. And HORRIFYINGLY darker.
There was a mass murder, which led to slavery and torture. Anastasia survives and endures it all with superhuman strength, and she is no longer anything like the feisty, cute child princess we meet at first. She becomes a slave, then a warrior and fighter.
Somehow, by some miracle, Damien shows up in the wilderness at the right moment and right place, and they reunite and escape together. Later, their relationship heats up and it becomes WHOA! - steamy at about the 80 percent mark. Much more explicit than I had imagined it would be from the reviews. After that is a whiplash of plot twists. Chapters and chapters of battles, blood, violence, time-travel dressed up in beautiful descriptions. I won't give spoilers, but I would say it's an incredibly satisfying end *for a fantasy book* with its multiple climactic events and a VERY beautiful last chapter, which was the escape from reality that I craved.
But here's the main thing that really, REALLY bothered me. I would have loved this book and praised it if it hadn't used real people. The heroine is taken from the true story of a real person who was killed just a little over a century ago. A real teenage girl. The victim of assassination. I've read enough about the real Anastasia to know that she was spunky and strong-willed, and like the author, of COURSE I wish she could've had the power to fight the murderers to save herself and her family. I can see why the author had this fantasy story idea and WHY she wrote this book.
But this is where fiction has to face the real world, in my opinion. Here we go.
The real, historical Anastasia and her three sisters were very innocent. They lived lives dictated by duty, public service, and *especially* Christian religion. They were raised in the Russian Orthodox faith. The girls' bedrooms were filled with crosses and pictures of saints. (In other words, they would have not imagined themselves as sorceresses or witches, because the idea would be downright SINFUL.) They were products of their culture at the time, proper royal Edwardian/early 20th century ladies. They did get a chance to see and talk to young men, because they nursed them back to health in the war hospitals. Maria was even said to have a crush on one of the wounded soldiers. That detail was even in the book for the fictional Maria. Anastasia was said to have played cards and games (even *gasp* pool!) with the soldiers, which was probably the most "romance" that the real-life teen got to experience. She was still just a kid who liked to take funny pictures with her camera and play with the family dogs. She even went to her death cradling a dog!
Of course, the real girls' lives were cut short by a squad of killers before they even had the CHANCE to have actual love lives with men. (With the possible exception of Olga (called "Ollie" in the book so as not to be confused with Aunt Olga. She was almost 23 when she was killed. Accounts say that she was seeing a young man with a lower rank while rejecting a suitor prince.)
So why all this? It bothers me that the book didn't take the life circumstances, facts, and the beliefs and wishes of the real Anastasia and her siblings into consideration when writing their fictional counterparts. The heroine is shown in several explicit sex scenes, and I just feel this sense of the book's disrespect for the memory of a real child who was killed while she was still a minor. Also, Alexei. He was a child killed at age 13, and I feel like it insulted his memory, too, to have his fictional counterpart drained of blood (especially because he had hemophilia in real life) and made to be a pawn of Vampire!Rasputin.
Those were the things that I really had trouble with. I guess you could compare Anastasia to Anne Frank. Would anyone think it's OK to write a fantasy story about Anne Frank, a believer in the God of Israel, as a "sorceress" with supernatural powers, who goes on to have a very adult relationship with her love interest (like that boy Peter she befriended) and have her counterpart be sexualized? Then have fantasy-Anne engage in sorcery combat with Nazi vampires? I didn't want to even TYPE that because I wouldn't want that story to be written. It disrespects the real child, Anne Frank, and her family. True, she didn't have an animated movie about her, which could've led to a book, but that's just too weak an argument.
In all, I just think this would have been better with the heroine as a completely fictional character, using different names with fictional history.
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