Name: The Lost Crown
Rating: 4.227272727272728 (11 reviews)
ISBN: 9781416983415

Sarah Miller

In alternating chapters, Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia tell how their privileged lives as the daughters of the Tsar in early twentieth-century Russia are transformed by World War and revolution.

The Lost Crown

Missy Zuber 

An okay book, but I guess I was expecting more somehow. Each chapter is through the eyes of one of the four sisters and I was always forgetting which Grand Duchess was narrating the chapter I was reading half the time. Sometimes you could tell by the events and who else was mentioned but the girls felt flat at times. 

I think I was disappointed in the end with the whole book.

Laura

As I said in my The Romanov Sisters review, OTMA has a special place in my heart because they were the first royal family I ever got into. In fact, my best friend at the time and I got really into them together, but in different ways. I was more into the facts about how they lived and their lives, and I never really gave any credence to the rumors of Anastasia's survival, preferring instead the truth that they all died together. My friend, on the other hand, was a dreamer rather than historian (as I am) and loved the idea of Anna Anderson and the Anastasia movie and all the romantic ideas of her survival. Somehow, I think this book would have been the happy medium between our two very conflicting views of the Romanov girls.

I don't know how this novel escaped my notice for so long. Well, actually I do. I hate historical romance and princess books and especially Romanov fictional books, because all of them are notoriously bad. Of course, maybe I just encountered unusually shitty ones and am taking it out on all of them, which isn't fair to them. In fact, I have a rule- no fictional books about real people- which is okay to break in certain situations but for the most part I just end up disappointed (See Gilt and Tarnish and my ratings on the Prisoner of Night and Fog duology). And I went into this book expected it to be okay or downright bad. And my expectations were exceeded completely, and I left with a huge amount of respect for Sarah Miller.

I could tell she actually cared deeply about doing her subjects justice. While some of the girls' traits did come across as a bit historical fiction cliche, they worked well with all of the sisters' individual personalities and felt believable She didn't attempt to manipulate each sister into being something she wasn't in real life because the author wanted her to be that way. Even when she added certain things (like Olga's unusual perceptiveness) she was sure to note it in her author's note and admit that she did it for the sake of the story, something I admired and could forgive her for. She really endeavored to capture each girls' individuality and the way they felt about certain things, like their mother or father or the state of the country. I also liked that Miller kept in the girls' religiosity, something that was a huge definer in their lives, instilled in them by their father and mother. Rasputin also wasn't demonized in this book, which is realistic given that there is evidence the girls liked him and respected him deeply as both a faith healer and a holy man. 

Are there issues? Of course. The girls' voices blend together to the point where, despite each having defining traits, I still had a hard time remembering whose chapter I was on. For some reason, though, I wasn't really that bothered by it. Also, the names were inconsistently transliterated- Nicholas, for example, is Nicholas some places and Nikolai other places. I can forgive this one, since most in the Western world know him as Tsar Nicholas II and not Tsar Nikolai II but the Tsarvich is Aleksey and not Alexei or even Alexis (the proper English equivalent of Aleksey and likely what he would have been called had he been on the throne). Of course, transliteration is confusing, but I wish she stuck to one system and not bounced around. Also, occasionally the book does suffer from historical name dropping. Like in the case of one particularly silted piece of dialogue, when Alexandra mentions that her "grandmother, Queen Victoria," taught her how to make beds, when there would have been no reason for her specifically say Queen Victoria because it was common knowledge that Victoria was her grandmother. Not that big a deal, but still, that stuck out to me.

Continue reading this review on my blog here: https://bookwormbasics.blogspot.com/2...

The Lost Crown

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