Reading: The Last Tsar's Dragons
Nov. 13th, 2019 08:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
white_hartThe new novella from Jane Yolen and her son Adam Stemple, The Last Tsar's Dragons, is a retelling of the events leading up to the Russian Revolution, with added dragons: the tsar's black dragons, which he sends to destroy the Jews of Russia, and the red dragons raised in secret by revolutionary Lev Bronstein (aka Leon Trotsky). It's told from multiple points of view, principally Bronstein, the mad monk Rasputin and a nameless bureaucrat who is also the overall narrator; it begins sometime in 1916 and focuses particularly on the growing resentment at Rasputin's influence over the Tsarina Alexandra, leading to his murder, and then the deposition and eventual murder of the Tsar and his family.
I've enjoyed Jane Yolen's books in the past, but unfortunately I really didn't get on with this one. I found it a rather strange book. The narrative has a fairy-tale quality, and while it is possible to write about the Russian Revolution in a fairy-tale style (Marcus Sedgwick's Blood Red, Snow White does this rather well), in this case I felt that the style of the narrative jarred uncomfortably with the subject-matter. The point of view characters were all unpleasant and self-interested and utterly unsympathetic; in particular, Rasputin and the bureaucrat came across as so nasty, especially in their attitudes to women, that I actually found their sections quite hard to read. In addition, the dragons didn't really seem to add very much to the plot; history followed almost exactly the same course as normal dragon-free history, except that dragons as a weapon of mass destruction perhaps made some of the deaths (particularly the deaths of the Tsar and his family) quicker and less painful than they were in reality. Obviously, it would be hard to write a cheerful novel about the Russian Revolution, but this was utterly bleak in a way that I would not have expected from a fairy-tale style narrative with dragons.
(Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for a free e-ARC for review.)
I've enjoyed Jane Yolen's books in the past, but unfortunately I really didn't get on with this one. I found it a rather strange book. The narrative has a fairy-tale quality, and while it is possible to write about the Russian Revolution in a fairy-tale style (Marcus Sedgwick's Blood Red, Snow White does this rather well), in this case I felt that the style of the narrative jarred uncomfortably with the subject-matter. The point of view characters were all unpleasant and self-interested and utterly unsympathetic; in particular, Rasputin and the bureaucrat came across as so nasty, especially in their attitudes to women, that I actually found their sections quite hard to read. In addition, the dragons didn't really seem to add very much to the plot; history followed almost exactly the same course as normal dragon-free history, except that dragons as a weapon of mass destruction perhaps made some of the deaths (particularly the deaths of the Tsar and his family) quicker and less painful than they were in reality. Obviously, it would be hard to write a cheerful novel about the Russian Revolution, but this was utterly bleak in a way that I would not have expected from a fairy-tale style narrative with dragons.
(Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for a free e-ARC for review.)
