Review: Tsarina

Tsarina by Ellen Alpsten
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I received an ARC Kindle edition of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Let's get the trigger warnings out of the way: this book gets rather graphic when it comes to sex (including rape and incest) and violence (including torture). Personally, I can tolerate this (mostly), but sensitive readers will have trouble with this one.

This book is a historical fiction that follows Catherine I from her lowly beginnings as Marta the serf to her becoming Catherine I, Tsarina of all the Russias. While, I did enjoy this book, there were times where it started to drag on an on about celebration after celebration and Peter the Great's insistence that everyone drink until he says so. The repetition started getting to me after a while.

I enjoyed the way the book was structured. You can almost see a movie while you are reading. The book opens with the death of Tsar Peter in 1725. The rest of the story is told almost through memory or flashbacks of sorts. Occasionally you are brought back to 1725 as the book progresses.

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