BagEndBooks

Typical love triangle. Typical "strong" (but not really) female lead being drawn to the love interest who's bad for her. I felt like this book could have been really good, only it wasn't, and I'm not really sure why. Vika's relationships with both of the boys felt too quick and forced. It was obvious the author wanted us to believe that she and Nikolai were deeply in love, and Pasha loved her but she didn't love him back, but all of the relationships went way too fast. If the author wanted to have any serious love interests, she would have had to make them have known each other BEFORE the games started. Nikolai and Pasha were best friends, and then Nikolai admits something (his magic) that he'd been hiding from Pasha all his life and suddenly Pasha has turned into the evil, bloodthirsty tsar who can't even face his own actions. Pasha will never make a good leader since he is irresponsible and selfish, but the fact that he is weak and lets his even more bloodthirsty sister control him let's you know that he will be a truly awful tsar, and, while I know there were a lot of awful tsars in Russia's history, I don't think the author wants us to think of one of her main protagonists as an awful tsar. Speaking of Pasha's sister, it was rather absurd that the author decided to make her be younger than Pasha. No older brother would let his younger sister control him so completely, and, even though there is probably such thing as a fifteen-year-old girl who is as bloodthirsty as Juliana, I find it illogical that she would have her ability to manipulate people honed as well as she did.

I could see that the author was trying to set things up with Rasputin being an undead faith-healer like Nikolai's mother, since he was somehow able to heal Alexi and it's said that it took enough poison to kill several men, two or three bullets and a night in an icy river to kill him. I know that this is fantasy and I shouldn't investigate any historical facts, but there were only three Tsar Alexanders and none of them really fit well into this time, because Alexander II was the successor to Alexander I (no Pasha in the middle, I don't remember Pasha's full name, but it was not Alexander) and Alexander III was succeeded by Nicholas II, the last tsar of Russia.

The ending was also disappointing. Nikolai and Vika couldn't find a unique way to get out of the game so there was the same 'I'll commit suicide to stop you from dying' trope, which was interrupted by a magical dagger being enchanted by Nikolai's competitive teacher so, despite Nikolai's intentions, the knife hit Vika, and then at his request she healed herself by using his energy, which drained him of all life because every magical book ever knows that if you give away more energy then you have then you will die, but for some reason Vika didn't know that and for some reason Nikolai thought it would be fine for her to drain all of his life, and she wouldn't feel even more guilty since she'd also accidentally drained her father/mentor of energy and life, and Pasha let that happen even though he knew it was wrong. Then it turns out that Nikolai is still a sort of shadow, somehow, not that that makes any sense. I wonder if Pasha will have as big of a temper tantrum when he finds out that Nikolai is his brother as when he found out that Nikolai was a sorcerer.

I was also rather disappointed because in my mind, only Celtic and Russian folklore/magic can have a story alongside Christianity without blaming Christians for problems or claiming the Christianity isn't real, but the author didn't take advantage of this possibility, claiming that the Russian Orthodox Church was responsible for burning witches and faith-healers, and implying that Christianity isn't real and the tsars only pretended to convert, while still believing in magic and sorcerers, and not the Church (which is really dumb since history always shows that countries tend to follow the king/queen/tsar/emperor etc. and convert when he/she converts, not the ruler converting only after most of the people, and only converting to make them happy. That is just not realistic, even in a fantasy book.)

Overall, this was an okay book, but had way too many typical YA tropes, and not enough uniqueness or Russian culture to set it apart from all of the other YA books coming out now.