This is a solid and very readable biography of Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna, who was the last Tsarina of Russia. I had never read a biography specifically of her, although I did know a lot about her life through my obsession with Edward VII. Alexandra was his niece, and his sister (Alexandra’s mother) Alice’s tragic death through diphtheria has always stuck with me as particularly sad. I did learn some new facts from this book, which is always a plus for me. It also lives up to the pull quote from the Mail on Sunday, which promised “a fluent prose style.” The pages flew by, and it was engaging. I tried to follow up with another book about Alix and Nicky, but that one was so slow and weirdly paced in comparison that I gave up.
Alexandra lived a truly relentlessly tragic life, and Erickson tells the story well. Alix’s childhood featured her brother dying from falling out a window due to his hemophilia, her sister and mother dying of diphtheria, and then Alix getting her legs sliced up by running through a pane of glass. She then had some brief happiness with Nicky, but he had to become Tsar before they were even married, which she was not well suited for due to her shyness and overall personality (Nicky was not suited to be Tsar, either). Then she struggled to have a son, only to have him have hemophilia due to her being related to Queen Victoria. And then there’s the Russo-Japanese War, WWI, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the culmination of the endless tragedies being their whole family being murdered. Again, Erickson tells the whole story in a way that zips along, and her life is so cinematically sad that it makes for compelling reading.
My main complaints here is that I caught an error and then there was another fact I was skeptical of, but she had no sourcing for it so I couldn’t check where she got this information from. I then became on alert for any facts I didn’t absolutely know to be the truth. Her bibliography was only about 2 pages long, which is because she only cited works from the footnotes, a fact I find confounding. Overall, while this was a good introductory biography on the subject and it was a smooth reading experience, it felt under-sourced and more general in terms of research. I don’t know if I’d recommend it since I haven’t explored this subject enough. In reading about 130 pages of another book on her life, I was noting other factual discrepancies, but I’d need to read a third book to see where the consensus is.