{"id":217,"date":"2003-01-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-12-30T22:07:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cushlamckinney.wordpress.com\/?p=217"},"modified":"2024-12-31T13:08:00","modified_gmt":"2024-12-31T00:08:00","slug":"anasasia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/2003\/01\/01\/anasasia\/","title":{"rendered":"Anastasia"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-large-font-size\"><strong>Colin Falconer<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-large-font-size\"><em>Random House<\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\">Otago Daily Times, 2003<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">The fate of Anastasia Romanov, youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II\u00a0 has long been a subject of speculation.\u00a0Rumours persist that she survived the bloody 1918 execution of the Romanov family, and over the intervening years a number of women have claimed to be her.\u00a0 It is against this background that Colin Falconer sets his novel <em>Anastasia<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">It is 1921, a year after the appearance of Anna Anderson (the most famous would-be Anastasia), and the fate of the youngest Romanov daughter is the mystery de jour.\u00a0 Journalist Michael Sheridan is working for the China Press in Shanghai when he stops a\u00a0 Russian prostitute from drowning herself.\u00a0Her name is the same as the missing princess, she carries scars that might have resulted from bullet or bayonet wounds, a genetic deformity similar to one the \u201creal\u201d Anastasia had, and no memory.\u00a0 The obvious suspicions arise, and the novel follows their attempts uncover the truth of her past, although this threatens to destroy their own happiness.\u00a0 Anastasia leaves Michael twice to marry men who promise (for their own reasons) to prove she is the lost Romanov princess.\u00a0Michael\u2019s search begins as an attempt win her heart, then as a way of freeing himself from his infatuation with her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Falconer has obviously done a great deal of research, and the novel follows an \u201cepic\u201d sweep from revolutionary Russia to New York just before the Wall Street crash.\u00a0 Unfortunately, it is spoiled by indifferent prose, and I found both Michael and Anastasia two dimensional and unengaging.\u00a0This book joins my list of novels that have been dispatched to the second hand shop rather than my own cluttered shelves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Colin Falconer <\/p>\n<p>Otago Daily Times review 2003<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[6,11,370,421,18],"class_list":["post-217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","tag-6","tag-colin-falconer","tag-fiction","tag-historical","tag-odt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1177,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217\/revisions\/1177"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}