(cont'd)
Nicholas didn't notice the orange rays shooting out of Alexandra because of the goof-balls -- and indeed, he doesn't pay all that much attention to his daughters, except to "leer" at them -- and Marie and Anastasia don't seem to have noticed -- maybe because they're hardly in the book at all -- but Tatiana noticed, so Alexandra turned the ray on her too. The girls forgot to talk about the experience later.
And maybe they forgot to talk about it because they have to talk so damn much about Olga's bitterness over not being able to be her father's Heir, to be Empress herself one day. Christophe Worthton attempted to get Nicholas to change the succession -- but again, the drugs got in the way, and nothing happened. So Olga is bitter, because she knows she'd do a good job.
The bitterness spills over into everything -- she hates her mother, she gets around to hating her father, she hates her relatives and ancestors, but most of all, she hates Alexei. One day in the garden, she sits against a tree, watching her siblings play, thinking: "Alexis in the bright light and me in the shade, that's how things always are for us, little tw*t, throne-stealer, s*d him!"
Which brings me to the anachronisms and unlikely language in this book: The language is a bizarre mixture of Edwardian childishness (Tatiana is "dear old Tattikins) and modern, Chav-ish violence (Alexei is called "tw*t" frequently, as well as "clown prince" and other things). Olga speaks of her father's subjects as "Citizens" and is an out-spoken proponent of "Civil Rights" (would she even have known the term in 1914?) and is against "gender-based degradation" (refering to her nursing job during the war -- which she also hated).
Christophe Worthton speaks of Olga as "that splendid young woman," but I can only think that his magic isn't working too well, because when she is fifteen, she considers killing her parents and brother, but can't think of any way to gather supporters for her coup -- and when the Revolution happens in 1917, she wishes that someone else had killed her parents. This Olga, far from being a "splendid young woman," is a bitter and nasty psycho (though a politically correct one) who needs medication, not a crown.
In the end, the family get to Ekaterinburg, where, during one of the "rescue nights" described in N&A's diaries, Marie and Tatiana escape and are rescued by peasants and a couple of British guys with a plane. The rest of the family is transferred to Perm, where Verion Rudge gets his ultimate revenge by killing the remaining five Romanovs. Olga, in starting her afterlife, realizes that she has to study up so that she can do this better next time.
Did I mention that she was also the reincarnation of some Siberian High-Priestess?
++++++
Obviously, I don't think that this is a good "Romanov" book, even for a novel -- but I hesitate to categorize it as thoroughly bad, because something compelled me to read it to the end. And I would hate to discourage anyone from reading such weirdness if they enjoy weirdness -- or just would like to try reading a very, very strange book.
Ultimately I think this book might inspire others to write Romanov fiction because there will never be anything quite as abnormal as this.
++++++++++
