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Average Customer Rating:

Sashenka

Customer Rating:

I throughly enjoyed this book. I was captivated from the first few pages, and could not bear to put it down. I too felt very emotionally involved with the characters and felt I was part of Sashenka's journey. I would reccommend this book to both young and old. Although I am not usually a fan of historical fiction, this novel really brought Stalin's Russia to life, and I felt I was living there among the characters. This is the first of Montefiore's that I have read but won't be for long!

Fiction? Of couse but no need for obvious historical bulnders

Customer Rating:

I have read Court of the Red Tsar, Potemkin etc and enjoyed them all very much although every 50 pages or so there was a ridiculous spelling or factual blunder that jumps at any reasonably educated Russian reader. These mistakes undermine the credibility of otherwise excellent books and are really frustrating as far as I am concerned. Sashenka (fiction, of course) is a real stunner in this department from the very first pages. On page one the gendarmes sport Mauser revolvers (they actually had Smith & Wessons or Nagants) and wear blue summer uniform jackets in the middle of winter (supposed to be wearing gray overcoats - it's cold!) topped with plumed hats (discontinued in 1907 and anyway part of summer uniform) instead of fur hats with badges. On page two the chauffer's reasonable (albeit long) Russian name Panteleimon turns into the mind-boggling Pantameilion (where is that from !?) and on it goes. "Borscht" with a "t" - sorry, this word has never had a "t", "Okhrana" loses a "k" - Okhranka was the common name for the Okhrannoye Otdeleniye - see Encyclopaedia Britannica and on and on and on. Mr Montefiore is supposed to be a historian, but this profession does imply more careful inspection of facts. Frustrating.... Need a consultant, Simon? Only £50 a word :)

Definitely not-put-downable

Customer Rating:

The book is extremely moving as a novel - the characters, their fate, the evocation of time and place that feels absolutely real. And it also contributes to an understanding of a phenomenon still all too relevant for our times - fanaticism. The context is Russian, romantic young idealists, whose absolute beliefs made them capable of blindness until forced to see, but by then it was too late. In the midst of all the brutality of the Stalin years, much of what humans are capable of is encountered in the drama: the conflict between decency and attempted self-preservation, murderous violence, heroism and also, even in those terrible times, passionate romance. There is an ironic twist at the end, but hardly more unlikely than the spectacle of Putin placing roses on the coffin of Solzhenitsyn. A great read.

luminous, literate, and enthralling

Customer Rating:

Of the many Russian-set novels currently en vogue -- Tom Rob Smith's Child 44, Boris Akunin's Fandorin series, the Dostoevsky sequels by R.N. Morris -- Sashenka is the most enduring. Not merely for its size, either: this is a full-blooded epic, colourful and sweeping, overstuffed with gorgeous prose and teeming with incident and action. There's something resolutely, even boisterously old-fashioned in Montefiore's story; the characters are so vivid, so fully imagined and presented, that we're reminded of Dickens -- or, more aptly, Tolstoy. It's a breathtaking novel.

A bit flat

Customer Rating:

I was rather disappointed by this novel. Authentic and no-doubt well-researched information is plentiful, but there is something ineffably flat about the writing, particularly when it comes to describing Sashenka's interior life. The whole thing reminded of a historical re-enactment: everyone going through the motions as precisely as possible, without the thing ever really coming alive. The plot was a bit contrived too, which did not help. That said, there are a lot worse books out there doing the chat show rounds.