Blog Tour Review: Enchantments by Kathryn Harrison

From the Back Cover:

St. Petersburg, 1917. After Rasputin’s body is pulled from the icy waters of the Neva River, his eighteen-year-old daughter, Masha, is sent to live at the imperial palace with Tsar Nikolay and his family—including the headstrong Prince Alyosha. Desperately hoping that Masha has inherited Rasputin’s miraculous healing powers, Tsarina Alexandra asks her to tend to Aloysha, who suffers from hemophilia, a blood disease that keeps the boy confined to his sickbed, lest a simple scrape or bump prove fatal.

Two months after Masha arrives at the palace, the tsar is forced to abdicate, and Bolsheviks place the royal family under house arrest. As Russia descends into civil war, Masha and Alyosha grieve the loss of their former lives, finding solace in each other’s company. To escape the confinement of the palace, they tell stories—some embellished and some entirely imagined—about Nikolay and Alexandra’s courtship, Rasputin’s many exploits, and the wild and wonderful country on the brink of an irrevocable transformation. In the worlds of their imagination, the weak become strong, legend becomes fact, and a future that will never come to pass feels close at hand.

Mesmerizing, haunting, and told in Kathryn Harrison’s signature crystalline prose, Enchantments is a love story about two people who come together as everything around them is falling apart.

My Thoughts:

I was really looking forward to reading a novel of Rasputin's daughter, and I was even more pleased to discover that Alexei Nikolaevich, the doomed Romanov tsarevich, was such a central figure to the novel. This is a novel about the last days of the Romanovs, but in this story, the four princesses take a back seat to their younger brother. This is a book for Alexei, and I like that.

After her father is murdered, eighteen-year-old Masha Rasputin, along with her younger sister Varya, is taken into the Romanov household, and not long after, Tsar Nicholas is forced to abdicate and the Romanov household is placed under house arrest. Missing her father, unsure of her place, unsure of the fate of the family who has taken her in, she forms a friendship with Alyosha, as Alexei is called by his loved ones. He is a smart young man; stoic and realistic, and so wise for someone kept so sheltered. Because of his illness, his family lives in fear of him hurting himself, and Alyosha has to live mostly through his imagination. Masha entertains him by weaving fairy tales and discussing history and literature with him, by retelling anecdotes from her father's storied life and from Alyosha's parents' courtship, by imagining with him a life he will never have. But her stories aren't always happy ones; she and Alyosha are both able to look upon the shared religious fanaticism of their parents with open and honest eyes, and Alyosha is able to comment on his father's failings as a ruler with surprising clarity and compassion. Fascinated by the French Revolution and well-versed on the subject, he calmly draws frightening comparisons and fateful predictions for his family.

Masha's stories for the tsarevich are interspersed with her own recollections of her father's humble beginnings and rise to fame, and the circumstances leading up to his death, and with Masha's ordeal after she is released from the Romanovs' prison as she tries to put some sort of a life together. Against the odds, she goes on to fulfill some of her lifelong dreams while keeping the Romanovs alive in her heart. It's all quite interesting, but her narrative jumps back and forth in time so much, and somewhat randomly, so that the story feels loose and disjointed, and I think it also contributed to my feeling of not really getting to know Masha.

While there are some moments of joyful imagination and fantasy, and, despite his fatalism, a burning in Alexei to experience all he can of life before the end, overall the story is one of sadness and strife and it left me with a heavy heart. Though the meat of the novel--Masha and her relationship with the tsarevich--is purely fictional, the historical backdrop is very real, and very intense. The setting of St. Petersburg comes to life, and I particularly enjoyed the depictions of the city and her people. The writing is lovely and Masha makes some beautifully-phrased observations, but it's also wordy and heavy on the introspection and commentary, and I found myself skimming a bit to get to the end. While I did not find the physical relationship that developed between Masha and Alexei to be at all unbelievable--in fact, I thought it was quite natural given the circumstances--I was a bit put off by the entries at the end from a purely fictional journal of Alyosha's that survived his death and made its way to Masha, as its contents seem to be designed to titillate more than anything else. But I always enjoy reading about Russia in fiction, and this is a very different approach to the Romanovs, and I liked that Harrison was able to inject some romance and escapism into such a tragedy.

My Rating:  3.5 Stars out of 5

Enter to win your own copy of Enchantments!

Simply leave a comment with your email address. This giveaway is open to residents of the U.S. and Canada, and ends at 11:59pm on Monday, April 2, 2012. Winner will be selected at random. Thanks, and good luck!

Enchantments is on a blog tour.

Click here to view the tour schedule!

Learn more about Kathryn Harrison and her work;

visit Kathryn's website!

This giveaway is closed and the winner has been selected!
Stay tuned for more great giveaways!