Daughters of a Dead Empire
As civil war between the Reds and Whites rages across Russia in 1918, Evgenia, a sixteen-year-old peasant, drives from village to village with her horse and wagon, peddling goods but finding few buyers. When she comes across an angry mob attempting to shove a bourgeois girl of about her own age into a fire, Evgenia saves her, but her sympathy for the would-be victim, Anna, only goes so far. A proud revolutionary, Evgenia refuses Anna’s pleas to drive her to the nearest train station—until Anna produces a diamond. Desperate to find a way to pay for a doctor to tend her dying brother, Evgenia agrees to give Anna a ride, unaware that her bedraggled but well-spoken passenger is the Grand Duchess Anastasia, who has just escaped the massacre of her family at Ekaterinburg. But with rival armies roaming about and the hunt on for Anastasia, the girls’ troubles are only beginning. Just as the heroines, who tell their story in the first person in alternating chapters, begin to like and trust each other, they find themselves in mortal danger.
Given the overwhelming evidence against Anastasia’s survival, which O’Neil acknowledges in her author’s note, a modern novelist who hopes to convince the reader otherwise has a formidable task, and I was never quite able to suspend my disbelief. I also marveled at Evgenia’s ease in throwing the F-word around at the slightest provocation, especially since some of the very rough men the teens encounter are more inhibited in their language. Still, this novel, O’Neil’s first, is fast-paced and well plotted, with two resourceful, feisty heroines. It should appeal to young adult readers and to older ones as well.
