Lovely Little Shelf

The Book: The Kitchen Boy: A Novel of the Last Tsar, by Robert Alexander

The Story: This is the story of the last weeks of the Romanov family, told through the eyes of Leonka, the kitchen boy.  When they were moved to the “House of Special Purpose” during the Revolution, only 5 servants went with them and during that time, the Romanov family treated these servants as one of their own.  Because of this, Leonka had a really intimate look at what was going on in their life and how they truly were behind closed doors.

In their last week, the Tsar and Tsarista used Leonka (and some nuns) to send messages out to someone on the outside who was promising to get them out of their prison before something terrible went down.  The whole story is being written as an old man looking back on the time and from the get-go, he reveals his regrets about how he handled this situation and how he was responsible for their eventual death.

The back-and-forth of these notes and the day-to-day life of the Romanov family is the core of this book.  The author revisits over and over what genuinely good people the Tsar and his wife and children were and how their guards and eventual murders truly were the lowest of low.  The Romanov family has an incredible faith throughout the book not only in God but in their country and in the fact that they were going to get out of this.

That makes it all the harder knowing that they aren’t going to get out of it.  History tells us, as does the narrator, that they were all taken to the cellar and shot during the night then their bodies were mishandled to the point that there are still rumors that some of the children made it out alive.  This mystery is what the whole last hundred or so pages focus on.  I’m not going to tell you the ending, of course, but I am going to tell you that it’s twisty and I had to read it twice to figure out exactly what happened!

What I Thought: I’m embarrassed to say that nearly everything I knew about this time in Russia’s history came from the movie Anastasia, which I seriously love.  Shaun studied Russian and History in school so has a pretty good grasp on both things. I must have asked him three zillion questions while I was reading this book.

That being said, even if you don’t have a history buff living in your house, the author does enough in the way of historical explanation that it really isn’t easy to figure out who’s who and what’s going on, so don’t let that scare you off.  I thought that this was a super interesting time period to read about and I really can’t believe that more isn’t written about it.

I thought that this book was pretty great.  I think that it is a pretty talented author that can take such a huge, tough subject, write a fictional account from a rarely-mentioned character’s point of view, do it in just over 200 pages and still manage to pack a punch.  If there was every a book that should be described as “tight,” this is the one.  Because he fit so much into so few pages, there really aren’t excess story lines, or really even excess words.  It was put together with just the right amount of heart and suspense.

Conclusion: I’ve said this 100 times and I really do stand by it: Good historical fiction makes the reader want to know more about what really happened.  This book did this times a thousand.  My husband has a handful of books about this time period and I wouldn’t be surprised, if I were you, to see some of these creep into my reviews in the next couple of months.  This is a good, short, easy to read book that is absolutely worth your time.