Interesting premise, but the story moved at what felt like a snail's pace. The dragons were basically irrelevant to the story, which seemed like it should be the most interesting part.

Russia, 1917, under the autocratic rule of Tsar Nicholas II. The imperial will is enforced by the airborne terror of the Tsar's dragons: great black beasts reared in the palace stables and then sent out across the country to ravage the lands of those the Tsar deems offensive - the Jews chief among them. But times are changing and, in a quiet Jewish village, a group of ambitious men have long dreamed of bringing that change to Russia. Now they have the means. As their leader Lenin drums up support beyond the borders, Bronstein and Borustch carefully work on a secret weapon that will bring down the forces of tyranny once and for all. Meanwhile, mutiny also simmers within the palace walls as a cabal of courtiers plot to rid themselves of the charismatic monk Rasputin. Set in the final days of the Romanov dynasty, this is a strange little novella: historical fiction skewed by the addition of dragons, which somehow never quite takes flight.

The Last Tsar's Dragons was first conceived as a short story for The Dragon Book, an anthology put together by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois. I haven't read the original, shorter version, but this novella unfortunately still does feel like a short story, without the richness or depth that the longer format allows. It's like a sitcom trying to survive on the strength of a single good joke. The key idea is this: the Tsar has dragons. Deep in the Russian forests, a group of would-be enemies have also managed to find a cache of dragon eggs which, when they hatch, become red dragons - the Red Terror in the flesh. But this idea isn't really developed: the dragons really don't do much for the majority of the story, and they don't change the course of history. The poised wit of Temeraire, and that series's alertness to counterfactual possibility, isn't present here. Instead, most of the story isn't about dragons at all. The authors seem far more interested in Rasputin.

And who wouldn't be? Rasputin was a fascinating character and so many legends swirl around him that he's ripe for a historical fantasy treatment. We see him exploiting his magnetic allure to get court women into bed, and to maintain his hold over the Tsarina and her fragile son Alexei - but we aren't taken into Rasputin's mind. We don't really get to understand what he wants. We don't see where he came from, or how he reached his present position, and we don't really understand why the courtiers hate him so much - except for his enviable proximity to the imperial family. Maybe that's enough? Much of the story revolves either around Rasputin himself or around the anonymous court functionary (the only first-person narrator among several plot strands) who dreams of getting rid of the monk once and for all. But all this could be a perfectly straight piece of historical fiction. I suppose I felt that the dragons were just there as a bit of a gimmick, to add sparkle to what is otherwise a rather prosaic and superficial story. And it feels like a monumental waste of opportunity - both because the dragons didn't do more, and because the story itself, which covers such momentous and dramatic times, felt so flat.

This was a bit of a disappointment. As usual, I seem to have taken a more critical stance than other readers: you'll see that Amazon has glowing reviews and quotes from very favourable press coverage. Unfortunately, it just failed to press my buttons. I preferred another historical-fantasy treatment of this same period, also in novella form, but considerably richer and more complex: The Five Daughters of the Moon - no dragons, I admit, but court intrigue and charismatic monks aplenty. I think this is probably just a rare misstep, because Jane Yolen is widely admired as a fantasy author. Although I haven't yet read any of her other books, I do have a couple waiting on my Kindle, so we'll see how I get on with those. 

For the post, please see my blog:
https://theidlewoman.net/2020/03/21/the-last-tsars-dragons-jane-yolen-adam-stemple/

I can deal with a book being bad if it's at least entertaining, and I can deal with a book being boring at points if it's well done the rest of the time. Unfortunately, this was both bad and boring.

The premise of The Last Tsar’s Dragons is pretty self-explanatory, it’s a retelling of the beginning of the Russian Revolution… with dragons. At first, only the Tsar has dragons that he mainly uses to chase Jews but, inevitably, the Bolsheviks manage to steal a couple of eggs and raise their own dragons, which are – obviously – red (and not black like the Tsar’s).

At first, I was intrigued by this book because of two reasons: the dragons and the gorgeous cover. Like pretty much everyone, I absolutely love dragons. Eragon is the book that made me fall in love with fantasy and, Goblet of Fire is one of my favorite Harry Potter books just because of the dragons (I still want a Hungarian Horntail to this day).

Having said that, while the dragons and the gorgeous cover made me look at the book twice, I was also intrigued by the concept of the story. The Russian Revolution is a fascinating period of history, so, of course, I thought that it would be even more interesting with the added of bonus of having dragons. Because dragons are awesome and everything is more interesting with them, right?

Well, no. At least, not in this book.

I must admit that this was a pretty disappointing read for me. While the concept was great, I found the execution lacking in many ways. First of all, the dragons are basically useless in the story, they’re just used as weapons but you could easily take them out and it wouldn’t change a thing in the book.

I enjoy historical fiction so, when I realized how little the dragons mattered, I thought I could still enjoy this novella as a historical fiction story. However, even that way, it wasn’t that interesting either. The story is told from several perspectives: Lev Bronstein (Trotsky), Rasputin and an unnamed bureaucrat. Out of the three, the bureaucrat is the one we follow the most and I found his parts tedious to get through. He’s extremely unlikeable and, while I don’t mind reading from the perspectives of douchey characters, they have to be remotely interesting. However, I can’t say that his character arc or his personality were particularly intriguing… I only kept reading for the occasional Trotsky scene because they were a bit more engaging but it wasn’t enough to redeem this book in my eyes.

So, in the end, I was a let down by The Last Tsar’s Dragons. It’s less than 200 pages yet, it took me ages to read. The characters were, for the most part, boring and unlikeable and, the dragons were underused. I don’t think the novella format suited the story. It’s pretty difficult to write a really good novella, sometimes they can feel like drawn-out short stories or condensed novel. I think this book fell into the former category: it would have been a lot stronger as short story only focusing on Trotsky and his dragons.

2 stars.



I received a copy of this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. My thanks to Tachyon Publications. All opinions are my own.

The Last Tsar’s Dragons was a joint project between Jane Yolen and Adam Stemple. And being a massive fan of Yolen – and dragons – I knew right away that I wanted to check this novel out.
Set in a time when the Russian monarchy was still in control – but not for long – this novel envisions a world in which the royalty of the land had access to dragons. And all that they would have done with them.
The Last Tsar’s Dragons is a retelling of the Russian Revolution in many ways, but with one major and obvious change; dragons. This fantastical telling is exactly that; fantasy being infused into the real world.

“So the dragons took off, galloping out the door, filling the barn behind them with gold dust that left the dragon boys coughing madly.”

Warnings: So anytime you hear about dragons being used to control a population, you should probably expect to hear some graphic depictions of death and burning. What happens here in The Last Tsar’s Dragons.

If you’re a fan of fantasy and of reading about the Romanovs, then you’re going to absolutely adore The Last Tsar’s Dragons. It’s a fantasy version of the revolution and their forced hiding. And you can quite naturally guess what was added to these pages to make it a fantasy telling.
This was honestly an extremely interesting read. I’m not a historical expect (and I would love to hear an expert’s opinion on this book), but I was fascinated by what I read here. Jane Yolen and Adem Stemple had such a way of writing this tale. It felt organic and rich with history and lore, even taking into account all of the alternations that had to be made.
I do want to stress one point (which I think I’ve made an okay point of doing already, but better safe than sorry): there honestly is really only one major change in this retelling. In many ways, this is still the Russia of history, as are the characters that fill the pages. Dragons have been added to the plot, but the story itself hasn’t been completely altered. Some people may love that, but others may not. It really depends on what you’re looking for. And what you’re expecting, I think.
I’m a huge fan of seeing authors working together on projects like these. So I honestly can’t help but hope that we’ll see more novels from this duo. Or any other new pairing, I’m not picky. I just want to see Jane Yolen work with more authors. Her work would lend well to it.

The new novella from Jane Yolen and her son Adam Stemple, <I>The Last Tsar's Dragons</i>, is a retelling of the events leading up to the Russian Revolution, with added dragons: the tsar's black dragons, which he sends to destroy the Jews of Russia, and the red dragons raised in secret by revolutionary Lev Bronstein (aka Leon Trotsky). It's told from multiple points of view, principally Bronstein, the mad monk Rasputin and a nameless bureaucrat who is also the overall narrator; it begins sometime in 1916 and focuses particularly on the growing resentment at Rasputin's influence over the Tsarina Alexandra, leading to his murder, and then the deposition and eventual murder of the Tsar and his family.

I've enjoyed Jane Yolen's books in the past, but unfortunately I really didn't get on with this one. I found it a rather strange book. The narrative has a fairy-tale quality, and while it is possible to write about the Russian Revolution in a fairy-tale style (Marcus Sedgwick's <i>Blood Red, Snow White</i> does this rather well), in this case I felt that the style of the narrative jarred uncomfortably with the subject-matter. The point of view characters were all unpleasant and self-interested and utterly unsympathetic; in particular, Rasputin and the bureaucrat came across as so nasty, especially in their attitudes to women, that I actually found their sections quite hard to read. In addition, the dragons didn't really seem to add very much to the plot; history followed almost exactly the same course as normal dragon-free history, except that dragons as a weapon of mass destruction perhaps made some of the deaths (particularly the deaths of the Tsar and his family) quicker and less painful than they were in reality. Obviously, it would be hard to write a cheerful novel about the Russian Revolution, but this was utterly bleak in a way that I would not have expected from a fairy-tale style narrative with dragons.

(Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for a free e-ARC for review.)

IT’S YOLEN APPRECIATION HOURS!!!!! This is a retelling of the events that led up to the death of the Romanovs and Rasputin, and the Bolshevik revolution BUT WITH DRAGONS!!! I can’t lie, it did make me think a bit of the Don Bluth Anastasia film ONLY because the characterization of Rasputin in the story reminded me of the film version. Slight trigger warning for the start of the novella as there is a LOT of anti-semitic dialogue going on but it’s justified considering the historical context.

I would have liked to know a bit more about how the Tsar got the dragons in the first place, and how they came about to being used in Russia. And was it only Russia? Did Britain have them too? Did Queen Victoria command a fleet of dragons too? Were they blue since the Tsar had black and the Bolshevik red????

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Jane Yolen and Adam Stemple - The Last Tsar’s Dragons
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Parent Category: Reviews
Published: 04 September 2019
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Jane Yolen and Adam Stemple - The Last Tsar’s DragonsWhat, I ask you, would have been if the Tsar Nicholas would not only have had his Cossacks to harrow the provinces, and especially the Jews, but also Dragons? And if Lenin didn’t only have his Red Army to send out and spread terror, but if the Red Terror would have included Dragons, too?

Well, wonder no longer, Jane Yolen and Adam Stemple provide us with The Last Tsar’s Dragons, a revised version of their revised version of the history of the Russian Revolution, and of the days and events leading up to it, which includes Dragons. Because... - well because why not? It makes about as much sense as everything else that went on.

And so we join the last Tsar (not that he knows that he is!) sending out his black dragons to harrow the Jews – to absolutely no point, the Jews are safe, having seeded their shtetls with drachometrs, early warning devices. And so they sit in their underground burrows and let the dragons have a go at other targets, to the chagrin of the affected Russians and thus the Tsar.
But one of these Jews, sitting out a dragon attack, is Bronstein, latterly known by his revolutionary name of Trotsky, who has at some point tracked down another brood of dragon eggs in faraway lands, and is now hatching and imprinting them, to put them at the service of the revolution, under the command of his comrade Lenin.

Nominally the story is being told by a nameless (and essentially faceless, by definition) court functionary, telling it to his guard. It is also told with a lot of hindsight, as he describes himself as “a man who has turned against the revolution that employed him for nearly thirty years” - of course he was, as such functionaries do, employed by the Tsar at the time of the story. And freshly married, to the delightful and much younger Ninotchka, which adds some personal frisson to the story.

The developing story is told in multiple threads – the court functionary is the only one talking in first person (as it nominally is a first person account, you see), but we also see the Tsarina (the German Alix, as she is known in whispers) and occasionally the Tsar, but especially we get to see Rasputin, the mad monk and presumed saviour of Alexei, the Tsarevich suffering from his inherited blood disease.
Besides this we get to see a lot of court intrigue, and the manoeuvring of the main pieces in this story trying to stay on top, trying to stay ahead of the curve.

I won’t bore you with the actual story – the authors didn’t actually change the main outline of what happened, and the outcomes, so you all know what's coming, unless you didn't pay any attention in history class, or course. All this does is flesh it out with fictionalised accounts, and add dragons to the proceedings. Some things make more sense with dragons…
The only purely fictional character is the court functionary, and he (or any number like him) must have existed, we are sure.
So, overall what you get here is a piece of history, with added dragons, and told in a highly entertaining fashion.
This story exists in multiple versions, with different length and levels of details. I’ve come across this (or a shorter variant thereof?) in Rachel Swirsky and Sean Wallace’s collection People Of The Book: A Decade of Jewish Science Fiction and Fantasy (splendid collection, btw, very much recommended). They don’t mention this publication in the notes to the story, so I’m not sure how it sits in the development of the tale at hand… and no, I did not go back to compare.

The book here contains the actual story (starting with the line “Your revolution is a lie” - stated by the nameless functionary), followed by a chapter entitled “A Snarky Note About Dragons and History” where the authors display their tools and the history of the tale; then follow Timelines (of actual events, of the Romanovs ie the Tsar’s family, and of the Revolutionaries), and a short section entitled About the Authors.

Now, about these authors. Jane Yolen has won multiple Nebulas and World Fantasy awards, amongst many other, and does not really need introducing, no? This story she wrote together with her son, the professional musician and Fantasy author Adam Stemple, himself an Award-winning writer with a good number of books, on his own and together with his mother under his belt.

More Jane Yolen

Thanks to the publisher for the review copy.

Title: The Last Tsar’s Dragons
Title: Fire above, Revolution below
Author: Jane Yolen
Author: Adam Stemple
Reviewer: Markus
Reviewer URL: http://thierstein.net
Publisher: Tachyon
Publisher URL: http://www.tachyonpublications.com
Publication Date: 2019
Review Date: 190818
ISBN:9781616962876
Pages: 148
Format: ePub
Topic: Russian Revolution
Topic: Dragons

An interesting alternative fiction, well written, with characters I could love or hate. Few things worse than blah characters, but every person (or dragon) in this story was relatable, even the insane one.

Good pace and interesting premise make it a fun, engaging read, perfect for the commute. Instead of trying to reinterpret history Yolen and Stem­ple offer a sharp and witty vision of historic events. A short and satisfying read.

My daughter got into Jane Yolen from English class in school and she was learning about the Romanov's in history. We were both excited for this book. It started out slow but picked up in the middle. Fun read!

I tried. I really did. I picked this book up 3 times and put it down within 30 minutes each time. Dnf the book at 45%
The story was boring and all over the place. I thought from the title dragons would be playing a larger part in the story but they seem to have been thrown in as a gimmick to grab people's attention rather than be a valuable part of the story.
I couldn't find myself caring about any of the characters and with all the different perspectives it made everything confusing. Maybe if the book only had one point of view it would be better.

Do find the end of the Russian Tsar’s reign fascinating? Do you love dragons? Well, if you put your hand up for both of these questions, I have the book for you!

I was originally found and was drawn to this title while I was coming down form my Romanov (by Nadine Brandes) earlier this year. Another retelling of the mysterious ending to the infamous Romanov family… and now with dragons.

This story starts as the revolutionaries start to gain power and momentum, at this time in the Tsar’s power is kept secure by his trusty fleet of dragons that keep all the empires’ enemies at bay. There is change in the wind prophesied by the Mad Monk and trusted advisor to the Tsarina, Rasputin.

This was a fast paced story, told by all of the players involved from the Tsar and Tsarina to Rasputin and the a Jewish revolutionary. I really enjoyed seeing the varied posts of view.

This was an interesting read, and I would recommend it to creative historical fiction fans… now if you excuse me, I’ll be over here googling the Romanovs and Rasputin!

The Last Tsar's Dragons by Jane Yolen; Adam Stemple was release June 6, 2019.

I received a complimentary copy of this book from Tachyon Publications through NetGalley. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.

#TheLastTsarsDragons #NetGalley

I didn't know this was a short story, or that it was a historical retelling when I started reading it. I don't usually prefer novellas or short stories, but this one was interesting and moved along quickly, without seeming to go Too quickly. It helped that it was a historical retelling, which allowed us to have a lot of knowledge about the background of the story without it having to be explicitly explained. It was very interesting to get a different perspective on the fall of the Romanovs, viewed from the angles of several key players. It was a little dark and a little sad, but I liked it.

Do you want a novella about the Russian Revolution in which Trotsky raises dragons? Because that’s what this is. The POV rotates quite a bit, so it’s not only Trotsky raising dragons, there are also sections on the Tsarina Alexandra’s views on dragons, Rasputin’s views on dragons, etc. Well, and some other things that aren’t dragons. There’s quite a lot of genuine history (fictionalized enough to provide dialog, inner thoughts, etc.) of the last days of the tsar’s empire and the beginning of the Russian Revolution–I was actually surprised at how closely this hewed to the reality of the world we live in, considering: dragons.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. The Russian Revolution and its main figures had enough weirdness for any speculative writer. In that context the dragons almost feel like the most normal thing, which may well have been the point.

In any case: if you’re like me, you heard the premise and made up your mind that you wanted it right away, and that is a very sensible thing to do.

An interesting take on history and use of metaphors, I did believe though that there was more research needed on the historical and linguistic aspects of the novel. Overall I thought it was creative and intriguing, but of course as a novella there is only so much that can be revealed in such a short time frame. I would say that if you're interested in Russian revolutionary history and don't mind a large reach of creative license, then it is worth the quick read.

I do love that the other dragons were red, thought that was quite clever and got a chuckle out of me.

Dragons!
That is honestly my main reason for enjoying this book!
I mean, I also enjoyed the story haha. I really liked that this book took place in Russia, and that it was really realistic. Like it all took place in ‘our world’ and the only fantasy factor were the dragons.
This book switches a lot between POV’s, without clearly explaining each of the characters. Normally I really don’t like that, but for this story it really worked.
The characters were interesting, but there was not so much depth to any of them. Probably because the book was really short.
Also most of the story it was not really clear to me what direction this story was going to take.. So it felt a pointless?! Until like 70% in I guess.
I liked the setting, I really liked the dragons. But I think the story felt a bit flat.

<i>I received this E-ARC via Netgalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review. </i>

I was really excited for <i>The Last Tsar's Dragons</i> - who wouldn't be, with a premise like it has? But I quickly found myself confused and then disappointed once I started reading. In an attempt to moderate my expectations, I took a break to see if I'd missed something and this book was aimed at a YA or even MG audience - I didn't think so, but maybe I was wrong?

And maybe I'm still wrong, but as far as I can tell from Goodreads and various bookseller sites, this seems to have been aimed at adult readers, which means there's really no excuse for how bizarrely simplistic the writing style and storytelling are here. Take my opinion with a pinch of salt - I DNF-ed this book at the 20% mark on my e-reader, 20% being my cut-off point for giving a book a chance to change a poor first impression - but... I read a fifth of this and couldn't stand the idea of giving it any more of my time.

The content itself is horrifying, but in fairness, it's absolutely meant to be - the story opens with the eponymous Tsar releasing his personal stable of dragons to go hunt and kill Jews; there's no way we're supposed to approve or find this light-hearted. That being said - while it can often be hard to read, good writers convey the horror of horrifying things. A reader's difficulty in getting through a story can be - maybe even should be, in some ways - directly proportional to the writer's skill, when the subjects include antisemitism, chillingly callous and unsubtle class-warfare, and the like. But I didn't feel that that was the case here; these things were horrifying <i>because they are objectively horrifying,</i> and because I arrived at this book already feeling horror towards these topics, not because the writers conveyed that horror well or made me feel it. Honestly, the only thing this book made me feel was rapidly-mounting confusion - even with only an A-Level in History, which hardly makes me an expert, I know the conditions that led to the Russian Revolution were more complex than the simplistic and childish tone taken by <i>The Last Tsar's Dragons</i> had any hope of conveying - which turned into frustration when the problems only worsened instead of getting better.

Bluntly, the writing here seems like a bland mess. I've read Middle-Grade novels that portrayed their characters with more complexity than the two-dimensional depictions here, and for some inexplicable reason, the writers can't seem to decide when their characters are <i>thinking to themselves</i> in first or third-person - info-dumping introspection randomly switched from first to third person as if the writers couldn't manage the transition between their characters' direct, personal thoughts and the de-individualised, generalised 'overview' thoughts that are typically conveyed via third-person. And while most of the characters were written in third-person, one was written in first-person, which wouldn't have bothered me except that there was no special significance to this character and no apparent reason for making him stand out in this way. The writers also utilised, for this same character, one of the tropes I absolutely <i>despise,</i> which is having a character think their (politically sensitive and dangerous) inner monologue <i>out loud</i>. That the character in this case openly acknowledged that this was basically suicide given the time and place he lives and works in only made me even more annoyed. I'm honestly unclear on whether I was supposed to be questioning his mental stability, given his grating, rambling, zig-zagging train of thought; on the one hand, I hope not, because if so it's truly awful mental illness representation - but on the other hand, if I <i>wasn't</i> supposed to be questioning the character's mental health, then it's extremely poor writing that led me directly to the conclusion that this was a man in desperate need of good mental health care.

There's so. Much. Info-dumping. So much telling-instead-of-showing. <i>The Last Tsar's Dragons</i> was always going to have an uphill battle - after the success of Naomi Novik's Temeraire series, which also utilised the idea of historical fiction + dragons, <i>Tsar's</i> was going to have to do more than just be set in a different historical time period to stand against the inevitable comparisons between the two. Based on what I could bring myself to read, it doesn't come close to succeeding. Novik did it better, and even if it didn't have the Temeraire series to compete with, <i>Tsar's</i> wouldn't be a good book.

Tl;dr - a great concept taken out back and shot by terrible execution.

(Pun unintended, but cherished as the one bit of entertainment provided by this book.)

(This review will be gathered together with other DNF reviews for a single post to my blog at a later date.)

I received an uncorrected advanced reader copy of this book from netgalley in exchange for a review.

The concept for this book--plus the names attached--made me excited to read it. I mean, revolution with dragons! Sounds right up my alley.

Unfortunately, the execution didn't live up to my expectations.

There are a number of point of view characters, and while I'm fine with that generally, in this case the amount seemed to come at the expense of very much actually happening--at least in the first half of the novella. A lot of each section was taken up with characters thinking about things at great length, which made for slow reading.

More importantly, I didn't actually like any of the characters. At all. For me, it's difficult to read something where I don't like any of the characters at least a little.

I'm not very familiar with Russian history or historical aspects of Russian culture beyond vague details, but felt like this book had a very surface approach that wasn't convincing. I wondered if that was just me, but see grin other reviews that it's not, so that's a bit disappointing as well.

I do have to point out, that I expected something very different from what I got. Sure, the blurb talks about revolution, Bolsheviks and Rasputin, all things we are familiar with, but I still expected a different Russia. After all, this world has dragons. One would think, that the existence of dragons would change the world in some way but the Russia in The Last Tsar’s Dragons is exactly the one you know from the history textbooks. Only that Tsar Nicholas has dragons.

Well, that’s not 100% true. While the real Nicholas had five children – Tatiana, Olga, Maria, Anastasia and Alexei – who all died with him Yekaterinburg, the Nicholas from the book has a son called Alexei, a daughter called Anastasia and two unnamed daughters who are still alive, and a daughter called Sonia who died of an illness before the book started. But considering none of that is in any way relevant to the plot and the afterword just tells us that the Romanovs were among the characters in the book that were real, without any caveat about how they didn’t actually have a daughter named Sonia, my guess is that the authors couldn’t be bothered to look up basic facts. This makes sense, since they also didn’t consider it necessary to run their German by an actual German speaker. And so the Tsarina says “Ein Fluch auf ihrem schmutzigen Drachens!” at one point.

Fun fact: I spent a lot of time yelling about Google Translate not being a reliable source but in this case it actually gives you the correct translation of “A curse on their dirty dragons” which would be Ein Fluch auf ihre schmutzigen Drachen. Bing Translate does worse with Fluch an ihren schmutzigen Drachen, but even they know that Drachens isn’t a German word, so I really have no clue how they managed to get it that wrong. Perhaps one of them once did learn German, just like they once learned Russian history and then were so convinced of themselves that they saw no need to check their vague memories.

Anyway, after this short diversion, back to the actual book. Which, as mentioned is The Russian Revolution with dragons. That means, that while the Tsar is busy being stupid and evil and antisemitic, his wife being German, stupid, evil and antisemitic, Alexei being sick, spoilt and evil and Rasputin being evil, creepy and antisemitic, somewhere else Lev Bronstein, a Jewish peasant, has found some dragon eggs and is trying to hatch them himself – a dangerous feat, since only the Tsar is allowed to own dragons. Bronstein is supported in this endeavour by his old friend Wladimir Ulyanov who has also brought a questionable Georgian character called Koba along who acts as a bodyguard for the eggs – and later the hatched dragons.

You probably know all those gentlemen under different names. Bronstein is more well known as Leon Trotsky, Ulyanov changed his name to Lenin and Koba is an early nickname of Joseph Stalin.

Yeah. I definitely did not expect that. And granted, I knew I was reading a fantasy book based on the Russian Revolution, an event that was very bloody and violent and which lead to decades of more death and violence. It’s not that this is the only book that ever did this. The Waning Moon books are set in a pseudo-Russia on the eve of a Revolution (including a character that seems to have been inspired by Rasputin and Stalin). The Poppy War is the Sino-Japanese war with magic. There are certainly many other examples and I think you can take a horrible atrocity, add dragons, mermaids or whatever and be tasteful about it. I don’t think it works when you make the actual architect of some of these atrocities – not even some thinly disguised version, not some conglomerate of several people – in a character in the book. Admittedly, while Trotsky is a POV-character in the book, Lenin plays a much smaller role and Stalin says only two or three sentences. But still: There’s a Wikipedia page Excess Mortality under Josef Stalin. In this book he plays bodyguard for some dragon eggs. I am uncomfortable with this.

But, YMMV and all that and neither Stalin nor Lenin are portrayed as likeable characters, so perhaps some people are OK with that. If you are: I’m not judging you (I do read a lot of other judgeworthy stuff myself after all). But I will inform you that it’s still a very boring book. Because, when I say “this is the Russian Revolution with dragons”, I’m speaking very literally. Do you have the most basic knowledge of the Russian Revolution (as in “the Bolsheviks took over, the Tsar and his family are imprisoned and later executed”)? Do you know the Boney M song Rasputin? Great! Then you know what happens in this book*. I mean it’s the Bolsheviks take over with the help of dragons, but since that happens off-screen, you won’t get much out of reading it. No, I’m not kidding. With the exception of Rasputin’s murder, all the action happens off-page and is then summed up in a few sentences. That is…not great. Of course, it’s a novella, and in the afterword the authors explain that they originally planned a full novel but couldn’t find a publisher, only one who would take a novella. But then you can’t just take the novel and leave enough stuff out to make it fit the novella length. Especially if the stuff is essentially the climax and you’re left with what’s more or less a retelling of historical facts.

*though not even the Rasputin here is the lover of the Russian Queen, but apart from that the lyrics are fairly accurate