Review: Tsarina

Tsarina by Ellen Alpsten
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It is 1725 and Peter the Great is dying.  He doesn’t want his son to be his heir and is writing out a decree to announce the next ruler of Russia.  Fate has other plans when he dies without finishing the sentence.  In steps his second wife, Catherine Alexeyevna.  Catherine may be ambitious and ruthless in her maturity, but she wasn’t always that way.  She was born into poverty and had to overcome many challenges on her way into the good graces of the Tsar himself.  She knows that as a woman, her role in any home is on shaky ground, but with Peter’s attention constantly roving, Catherine has had plenty of practice designing schemes to get what she wants.

Tsarina is a historical fiction story that is not for the faint of heart.  The events described are violent and sensual and readers won’t know which is coming next.  Although the violence of war and the graphic nature of violence against women during this time are understandable, I did not like how Alpsten took every opportunity to graphically describe sex scenes in the middle of an otherwise appropriate storyline.  I didn’t care that the characters were having sex; it was the details of the acts that were not needed in this novel.  Tsarina is a good historical fiction story with a different spin on the backstory of Catherine Alexeyevna.  

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