Oh, where to begin? Where to begin? I bought this book in December 2012 while I was on an HPB run on lunch from a cataloging workshop. I wasn't expecting high scholarship, if only from the terrible cover. To the smart aleck saying not to judge books by their covers, let me take a second and tell you why this cover is worthy of judgment. It's anyone's guess why this woman decided to put a cover on said book featuring a red-tinted, badly-shopped image of the 1902 Rothschild egg over the 1914 Livadia portrait of the Imperial family. Please notice the idiotically superimposed Imperial eagle right over the cockerel's neck. The 'shop job is so bad that in person, you can see the pixels.

But I digress. Having very little expectation but willing to spend $2 to see what she had to say, I bought the book and read it as part of last year's alphabetical challenge. The back cover praises Rappaport for a fair and unbiased treatment of her subject matter, but as you can imagine, a woman with such credits as Lenin in Exile, Joseph Stalin: A Biographical Companion, and the Encyclopedia of Women Social Reformers, she was about as balanced as a chocolate diet. Mostly all she does is use the word "hagiographer" incessantly and dedicate whole paragraphs to demeaning these supposed flattering biographers, whoever they are. Greg King (her obvious mentor and responsible for chunks of her ridiculous bibliography) praises her to the skies. All this told me that this "nonfiction" work was going to be this close to a waste of time.

But librarians read things that are wastes of time. Why? So you don't have to. Let me break down not only what made this book so terrible (or "what made me dislike it so much," if you're a stickler) but also why you shouldn't read it.

Go ahead, judge the book by its cover. Because this crudely podged together cover is a perfect summation of the slapped together idiocy that passes for the book's "scholarship." Frankly I don't think Rappaport could understand real scholarship if it hit her in the head. I mentioned her "bibliography" a second ago -- it doesn't even deserve the name. From misspelled names to flat-out incorrect titles, she makes every mistake in the book -- including the first mistake everyone makes in freshman composition, which is to split the bib into "primary" and "secondary" sources and then define "primary" as "stuff I used the most" and "secondary" for "stuff I didn't use that much." The sources she chose to use and the ones she decided to skip were also telling. For example, she didn't cite Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich's biography even though he was Nicholas' Favorite, his aide for many years, and also deeply involved in the murder of Rasputin. She also doesn't reference his sister's autobiography, the two-volume memoirs of Grand Duchess Marie. You might defend this by pointing out that this book focused on the "last days" of the Romanovs and neither of those two were around for that, but I would answer that 1) she spent so much time skipping through dates that their lack is conspicuous and odd, and 2) she referenced others who were just as little involved in the actual "last days." Paul Bulygin, for example, is an early witness but an unreliable one! Not to mention sources she must have used and didn't bother to put in the bib at all -- when I came across a quotation that I knew where she had gotten it, I found it impossible to find the citation in either her "primary" or her "secondary" sources. Oh, and by the way, I had to recall where the quotation came from because she never cited anything in the text.

Now, she wrote this book in a narrative style that jumps back and forth in the timeline, apparently just to give her enough words to pad out each chapter, and maybe for that reason she decided against using any kind of system whatsoever to identify quotations, paraphrases, or other references to information she didn't just make up off the top of her head. On the other hand, the advantage to reference-free writing is you can make up whatever you want off the top of your head and no one will know the difference. For example, if I subtly slipped into the next paragraph that she wrote extensively about the empress' pet green hippo, you'd have no way of knowing this wasn't true. Even if it sounds peculiar, you couldn't determine if I was lying without clapping hands on the document. Now imagine if I were discussing some 40 or 50 documents -- the only way you'd know I was talking crazy is 1) to sift through the dozens of documents yourself, or 2) know the subject well enough to know. In the meantime, plenty of ignorant readers who don't know or care to find out will blithely carry on the misinformation about a green hippo. And that's why it makes me angry.

Honestly, that sums up the gravest faults of the book and there's not much else to say. I suppose she thought she divided it cleverly: a chapter for each day of the final week, and each chapter/day being dedicated to one of the family, because, how creative, there's seven of them and seven days! But she followed nothing close to a timeline, starting with events in 1917 and then jumping around, back to Nicholas' childhood, forward to 1918, back to 1904, back again, forward, back . . . ! And outright mistakes aren't limited to the bibliography either. She couldn't get Michael Romanov's name or the details of his death right, and while the American President Wilson gets a page and a half of flowery, poetic description, Nicholas is repeatedly condemned for the apparent crime of not doing things Helen Rappaport and Greg King's way. Wilson wasn't the only random she jumped around to, either, and all these other unrelated individuals seemed to get more positive treatment than the Romanovs themselves -- especially poor Alexandra, whom she framed as a terrible wife and mother, a hypochondriac who drove her husband nearly insane, and also little Alexei, whom she basically denounced as a brat. Unable to conceive of a loving, tightly-knit Christian family, Rappaport depicts the Romanovs' final days as the torment of a fractured, fragmented group held together by nothing more than their captivity. Not only did she make me feel like they all welcomed death just to escape one another, she made me rather long for death as well! So much of this book is useless, unverifiable padding, and cruel fantasy (where the jabs at Nicholas and Alex's marriage are concerned). This book doesn't even deserve to be flung across the room, as Dorothy Parker would say -- don't even do it the honor of picking it up.

I have to say I liked this better than Helen's other book, The Romanov Sisters. I feel like in the other book, she failed in her goal to tell each girl's story, but this book definitely does give new light to the last days of the Romanov's. My only issue is that I personally disagree with Helen's assertion that the missing body from the missing grave was Maria, but that's a personal issue I have. Through my own research I believe it was Anastasia not Maria, but hey no scholar can currently agree with which sister was missing from the big grave and we may never know until the Russian Orthodox Church allows for more testing.