I've never read anything by Laurie Graham before, and to be honest the only reason I picked this up was because the Romanovs and Russian history in generals are great passions of mine.

Initially I found this quite dry and hard going as I flipped back to the family tree every couple of paragraphs. After a while I decided to stop and just go with the flow of the novel, which made a big difference.

Overall a brilliant novel that genuinely bought history to life. Laurie Graham made the historical figures feel real and relevant.