Anna Anderson’s claim to be Anastasia Romanov—sole survivor of the murder of the czar’s family during the Bolshevik Revolution—is explored in this drama of historical suspense.
In her third novel, Lawhon (Flight of Dreams, 2016, etc.) fictionalizes the story of a woman named Anna Anderson, who was pulled out of a canal in Germany after a 1920 suicide attempt. She claimed to be the surviving daughter of Nicholas and Alexandra Romanov. The czar, his wife, and his five children, along with a few family servants, were famously shot en masse…but this woman claims she escaped. Not only does she resemble Anastasia, but she has the scars on her body that would necessarily be there if she had survived the shooting, and in the course of the 50-year period during which she makes this claim, she wins important supporters, including a childhood friend of the czarevna—as well as many detractors, particularly among the extended Romanov family. Lawhon tells Anna’s story in reverse: from 1970 in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she awaits the results of the final German court ruling on her identity, going backward to 1920, when she was pulled out of the canal. Anastasia’s tale is told in the first person in the opposite direction, starting in 1917 with the Romanovs being taken prisoner in their palace and going forward through their exile in Siberia to the night of the murders. This makes a certain amount of sense, as it allows the story to converge on the moment of truth, when we will find out if Anna is, as she certainly seems to be, Anastasia. What pushes it a little too far from the point of view of readability is the decision to tell individual Anna chapters backward. So, for example, a chapter that covers the period 1928-29 starts in November ’29, then has a section set four months earlier, then six months earlier, then one month earlier, and so forth. Anna’s globe-trotting trials and tribulations are hard enough to follow without this level of intricacy. So the Anastasia story ends up being the more compelling of the two, hurtling as it does to its grisly ending. Then comes an interesting Author’s Note, where Lawhon discusses her process and decisions.
Somewhat overcomplicated but ultimately satisfying. Anastasia Romanov lives yet again!Pub Date: March 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-385-54169-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
Categories: GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | HISTORICAL FICTION | MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | HISTORICAL MYSTERY
Did you like this book?
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
13
GET IT
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
Did you like this book?
PROFILES
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Did you like this book?
© Copyright 2022 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
