Reviews with content warning for Toxic relationship - Zarina

Clumsy writing, odd pacing, unnatural dialogue and weak characterisation are barely held up by the plot - the only thing that kept me reading this frustrating book. But as it’s historical fiction the plot is the only thing that isn’t totally original. I will not be reading anything by this author again, her style aggravates me too much.

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ravensandlace's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional inspiring sad tense slow-paced

Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

Find this review and others like it at https://aravenclawlibraryx.wordpress.com

A special thank you goes out to St Martin's Press (my favorite publishing company) and Netgalley for allowing me to read this eARC. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

This book wasn’t what I thought it was going to be. I was a bit misled by the synopsis. I had thought it was going to be about how Catherine I came to power after her husband’s death. I thought I was going to see a struggle with her daughter, Elizabeth. But what I got was the entire life of Catherine up until the point of her husband’s death with a few pages of what happened afterwards. Which wasn’t bad, don’t get me wrong but it wasn’t what I expected. This was a bit of a miss for me which is sad because I love St. Martin’s Press so much.

It also didn’t help that was very confused as to who Catherine was. I had thought for the longest time that it was about Catherine the Great but come to find out, there was more than one Catherine. Monarchs really need to switch up their names. I had to do a google search in order to understand. Because Catherine the Great’s husband was also named Peter. I was just a big mess. So it was a very confusing 50 pages or so.

I think one of the reasons why I didn’t completely love this was the formatting. I got an eARC from Netgalley which I know is bound to lead to some formatting issues. However, I found out that this was a re release so I thought the formatting would be a lot better. There were huge walls of texts.I’m talking just pages and pages of text with no paragraph breaks. It was hard to read at times. I had to turn on Netgalley night mode just so my eyes wouldn’t burn to death. I also had to read it on my phone because when I brought it up on my iPad, the formatting didn’t take into account the bigger screen so it was absolutely miniscule on my iPad.

Beside the formatting issues, I actually enjoyed this book despite the rather less than rave review up until this point. Of course, that was after I figured out who it was about. It’s nice learning about different tsars than the usual ones like the Romanovs, which is what I usually gravitate towards. I admired Catherine for her strength and her cunning. She truly did whatever she could to make sure she would survive. Which I know can be rough considering what she was up against.

One last thing before I wrap this review up. I know I posted my trigger warnings at the top of this review but I wanted to make a separate paragraph especially for this. This book was rough to read in terms of the content. There are a lot of places where Catherine is raped and it’s described pretty graphically. It was hard to read at times because your heart just bled for her. She didn’t deserve that. Not one bit. There is also so much misogyny and it’s often unchallenged as it usually is where historical books are involved. So take care while reading this book because it gets pretty rough.

Overall, this was a good book hence the 3.5 star rating. I think I would have it rated it higher if the formatting hadn’t been such an issue. Also I think the synopsis needs to be changed. It’s kind of misleading. But other than that, I did enjoy this book but it just wasn’t one of my favorites. I’m not discouraged though. I’m sure St Martin’s Press has many more books for me and just waiting to be discovered.

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