A great read (listen)! Basically all I know about this era of Russian history is, humiliatingly enough, from the animated movie Anastasia, so I spent the whole book being like, but where's the talking bat??? j/k. I mean for real there's no talking bat in this book, but it's a very compelling historical narrative with great use of primary source documents. I liked that the audio version had other readers for the letters and journals. It kinda spiced things up.

It's also a great combination of humanizing the Romanov family and understanding how and why they were so cut off from the world, but also of how desperate the peasants were.

also MURDER.