I was Anastasia by Ariel Lawhon ~ Book Review

In 1918, after surrendering his throne, Tsar Nicholas and his family are under house arrest in their palace.   Then they are forced to travel many miles by train to a house in Ekaterinburg where they are kept in even stricter conditions for another year.  When they Bolshevik's take over the gov't the imperial family, which included 4 daughters and 1 son, along with a couple of their caretakers, are taken into a basement where they are met with a firing squad.  No one survived the massacre.  That is what all the executioners say and want everyone to believe.

In 1920 a young woman with horrific scars on her body is pulled from a canal in Berlin.  People watched her jump over the railing but she refuses to say who she is or why she jumped.  Suicide being illegal at the time, she is questioned by the police and sent to a mental institution.  Finally she reveals that she is Russian Grand Duchess Anastasia.  But now she calls herself Anna Anderson and she sets herself on a course to prove in the courts that she is the Grand Duchess so she can finally lay claim to the inheritance that her father, Tsar Nicholas, set up in a bank in England before the revolution in Russia.

I found this book so interesting.  I've always been interested in this time of Russian history and the fall of the aristocracy in Russia.  Most people know of Tsar Nicholas and though they may not know everything that happened around the revolution they do know the whole family was massacred in Northern Russia by firing squad at the hands of the Bolsheviks.  Because the body of Anastasia Romanov was not recovered immediately, the survival of Anastasia was always a question and mystery of the time.  Anna Anderson spent years trying to prove she was Anastasia.  This book takes their stories and weaves them together in a clever way.  Young Anastasia's story is told in first person and moves in a forward timeline.  It is heartbreaking.   Anna's story is told in third person and moves backwards.  The backwards telling is done in a unique way, giving a date and then moving back in jumps of hours or days or weeks, sometimes several in one chapter.  It was a bit confusing at first but once I got the hang of the style, and making sure I read the time post at the tops of the chapters, it was most interesting to me and kept me turning the pages.  I was fascinated as this was a piece of the Romanov history I hadn't yet read about.  I've read lots of books on the Imperial family but never any about Anna Anderson.   I loved the way the author told this piece of history.  Even if one knows the outcome of this side of the story, I still found myself turning the pages to see how it all unraveled.  I love how she presented the family, letting you in on how they might have felt during their captivity, putting a human face to their tragic story that the non-fiction books struggle to do.  Anna Anderson, was a very interesting part of this story and an enigma that puzzled police, lawyers and doctors for years.  I love how this author presented her story and kept you guessing even though I already knew the answer.   

I gave it a 10/10 because I found it riveting and unique.