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Enchantments (2012)

by Kathryn Harrison(Favorite Author)

3.21 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

1400063477 (ISBN13: 9781400063475)

languge

English

genre

Romance

publisher

Random House

review 1: I love historical fiction, and I was beguiled by the prospect of a novel about Rasputin's daughter and the Romanovs. I was disappointed. While I enjoyed the second half of the novel more than the first, the first 70 pages dragged, tempting me to abandon the book altogether. I had a hard time picking up the flow of the purported "transporting" language that the cover blubs promised. The plot revolves around the relationship between Rasputin's oldest daughter and the Romanov son, in an interweaving of storytelling between the two, that revolves largely around the adolescent boys fantasies and urges. The other Romanov family members dissolve into the background, with the partial exception of Czarist Alexandra. Mt favorite part of the book was the scene in the Faberge egg in... more the last chapters. The story balanced out in the latter pages of the book, but overall it was unsatisfying.
review 2: This is the story of the final days of the Romanovs, as recounted by Maria(Masha), the eldest daughter of Rasputin. He is presented as a religious healer,visionary, rustic, sexually prolific, but chaste with the czarina with whom he had a close relation brought about by the hemophilia of the czarevich Alexander(Alyosha)-transmitted from Queen Victoria to several of her royal descendents-but kept under covers by Czar Nicholas' family-in the hope that he could heal the future czar, where all physicians had failed. Rasputin is murdered-poisoned, shot, has his head caved in, and thrown through the ice of the Neva R. His 2 daughters are brought from Petersburg to the royal residence at Tsarkoye Selo. There Masha develops a close relation with Alyosha, but the Bolsheviks arrest the czar's family, emprison them under guard for a year in a rural house, and finally murder them. Masha escapes by marrying an older man who takes her to Paris, but soon dies, and she gets a job as a trick horse rider, and subsequently moves to the USA where she joins a circus as a big cat tamer, and is almost killed when attacked by a circus bear. The story has a skeleton of historical truth, though much of it is invented. less

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