LOST ROSES by Martha Hall Kelly

The author wrote a great book with Lilac Girls, and has now taken a step back a generation using much the same structure as she takes on the Russian Revolution. She uses the voices of Eliza Farriday (mother of Caroline from Lilac Girls and the only connection with the former book), and two women caught up in the horror and mayhem of the collapse of the Romanov monarchy and disintegration of Russia. Eliza is wealthy, connected and determined to help her old friend Sofya Streshnayva, a cousin of the Romanovs. Sofya and her family are the enemy in the new Russia, and face difficult and frightening times as they struggle to survive. Varinka, is the third narrator. She and her mother live an impoverished existence near where Sofya's family has its country residence. She is drawn into caring for Sofya's baby son, and is forced into making some difficult decisions to ensure her own survival as well as that of the boy. 

So that's the basic plot outline, and it is a good plot. Within this frame work and 420 pages a lot happens in New York where Eliza lives, in St Petersburg and in Paris. There is a lot of violence, horrible things happening all well documented historically if the reader wishes to know more, people struggling desperately to live, White Russians being ruthlessly hunted by the Reds, very little mercy. In New York Eliza struggles with the death of her husband, her increasingly way ward daughter, but these were pathetically trivial compared to what was going on at the same time in Russia and I found Eliza, despite her good intentions very annoying. Especially as the book went on.

And this is just a part of what reduced my initial 'great story' feeling to one of 'not so great'. The first half is pretty good - good story set up, interesting characters, great historical backdrop well described, quite high level of tension as to what is going to happen. The second half felt like a completely different person was writing the book, as if the care had gone, or the author had only a few days to complete the story. A certain amount of disbelief started to occur, things happened too quickly, the writing got shabby and lazy, the flow and connection stopped, there were too many easy and unlikely coincidences, it rambled. By the time I reached the end I no longer liked any of the characters, and of course it is not the characters' fault - it seemed the writer no longer cared about them. There have been terrific novels written of this appalling time in Russian history, but this is not one of them.