The tsarinas daughter

This book is a beautiful blend of triumph, tragedy, and everything that comes in between. It has the perfect combination of history, folklore, superstition and creativity to make it a dreamlike world you can fall into. The visual story telling is some of the best I've ever read and I can't help but just take a deep breath as I read some of the descriptive paragraphs, the winter palace, summer palace, Moscow, St. Petersburg they all come alive on the page and are really another character in this stunning novel. Elizabeth will go through every emotion you can fathom in this book, despair, love, grief, revenge, you see someone that seemingly had it all, a Romanov Princess, a Tsarina at one point and a woman who has her heart broken in deepest of ways at another, but through it all you see her as a woman, a sister, daughter, friend, someone that seems so complete as a character. All of the characters are well written, complex, insightful, and of course bring life to a story so many people find fascinating. Who hasn't heard or read of the Romanovs and the things they did both good and bad, who hasn't wondered what it would be like to live that life? However if this story showed me anything it's be careful what you wish for, because sometimes, being on top really only means you have the farthest to fall and you're the one in the most danger from the most people, even the ones you least expect it from. Our story starts with a gut wrenching decision and in the pages that follow will show how every small decision, every scheme, every betrayal led to that one decision, and how it ends, well, I for one wasn't ready for that ending but it was perfection. Alpsten has created pure magic with this one, it's visual story telling at it's absolute finest, for me the best books are the ones I can get totally absorbed in, to the point that I can feel what's being written about, here I could imagine the taste of the food, the feel of the water in the grotto, the feel of a falcons feathers, everything was described in such detail that it truly made the book come alive, and for me that is what reading is all about.