Author: Paullina Simons
Category: Historical Romance (WWII, Russia)
Length: 810 pages
My Rating: 1 – Did not finish
From Goodreads.com: The golden skies, the translucent twilight, the white nights, all hold the promise of youth, of love, of eternal renewal. The war has not yet touched this city of fallen grandeur, or the lives of two sisters, Tatiana and Dasha Metanova, who share a single room in a cramped apartment with their brother and parents. Their world is turned upside down when Hitler's armies attack Russia and begin their unstoppable blitz to Leningrad.
Yet there is light in the darkness. Tatiana meets Alexander, a brave young officer in the Red Army. Strong and self-confident, yet guarding a mysterious and troubled past, he is drawn to Tatiana--and she to him. Starvation, desperation, and fear soon grip their city during the terrible winter of the merciless German siege. Tatiana and Alexander's impossible love threatens to tear the Metanova family apart and expose the dangerous secret Alexander so carefully protects--a secret as devastating as the war itself--as the lovers are swept up in the brutal tides that will change the world and their lives forever.
My Thoughts
I thought I was going to love this book. It has a 4.5-star average on both Goodreads.com and Amazon.com, and was highly recommended by friends with similar taste in books. I was so confident this book was going to be great that I bought a copy (albeit used and fairly cheap) instead of checking it out at the library. I even almost bought Tatiana and Alexander (book #2 in this series) alongside the first one, just in case. I'm so glad I didn't.
I noticed how heavily the book relied on conversation right away. I was annoyed by it, but not enough to not give the book a chance. And, since Alexander and Tatiana met almost immediately, I thought this was going to be my favorite kind of romance — the kind where the getting together doesn't happen in the last chapter. It wasn't until the love triangle (there are very few books where love triangles don't annoy the hell out of me) was introduced that I seriously began to doubt my ability to like this book.
The obstacles Alexander and Tatiana had to overcome — mainly Dasha and Dimitri — were not believable, although the latter was more believable than the former. It was long for me to detest Alexander for continuing his relationship with the self-centered, trampy sister. For what purpose, I never could understand. This coupled with all of the rambling details and a plot driven entirely by conversation, made me not care in the least what happened to these two.
I ended up reading 342 plus pages before deciding to lay it down. Then, I picked it back up and spent the next two hours skimming the remaining pages hoping there would be something to catch my attention, or help me understand what was so appealing about this book. Nothing.
Needless to say, I will not be reading anything else about Alexander and Tatiana, and it will be a long,long time (if ever) that I give another Paullina Simons book a try.
P.S. I will be counting this book towards my yearly book goal as 342 plus pages is book length, not to mention the hours of my life I will never get back.
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