When the rascally Grigory Rasputin is murdered during the final days of czarist Russia, his two daughters are left in the care of the doomed royal family. In this disappointing novel, Harrison (The Kiss) imagines the interior life of the eldest girl, Masha, 18 at the time of her father's death, as she grows close to the young Alexei Nikolaevich, the famously hemophiliac son of the deposed czar. The "Mad Monk" Rasputin, with his women and his alleged healing powers, must be one of history's most intriguing characters, so it's hard to go wrong in his company. Unfortunately, despite such riveting material, the book's language remains flat, the experiences and emotions of its characters never quite coming to life. Undeniably well researched, some details are truly fascinating: the Romanov girls sewing jewels into their undergarments and the amount of gasoline (150 gallons) used to burn corpses in an abandoned mine shaft. Seminal aspects of Masha's later life, however, feel weakly sketched. Some interesting texture is achieved through the pacing and the later discovery of Alexei's journal, but as often as not, the configuration leaves the novel feeling at once predictable and scattered. Agent: Amanda Urban. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

*Starred Review* After the body of the revered and loathed mystic Rasputin is pulled from the ice-covered Neva River in Saint Petersburg, on New Year's Day, 1917, his two daughters are taken in by the Romanovs. The czarina is hoping that Masha will be able to ease the suffering of their hemophiliac son, Alyosha, as her father did. Masha does not possess Rasputin's magnetizing powers, but she is strong and canny and has a gift for storytelling. And so in Harrison's dazzling return to historical fiction, in her thirteenth book, she envisions Masha as a Russian Scheherazade regaling the preternaturally dignified heir with enchanting tales. Masha tells the opulently romantic and sad love story of his parents, Nikolay and Alexandra, and remembers her father not as the monster history portrays but, rather, as an ecstatic unholy holy man and a wildly libidinous itinerant faith healer on a madcap motorcar pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Mutually infatuated, the czarevitch and his word healer stoically face separation as Alyosha and his family meet their cruel and gruesome fate, and Masha escapes to Paris, then to America, where she puts her trust in animals and becomes a lion tamer. Harrison sets historic facts like jewels in this intricately fashioned work of exalted empathy and imagination, a literary Faberge egg. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: A best-selling author of great literary finesse, Harrison will attract fans and new readers while on a national tour with this bewitching historical novel about the infamous demise of a legendary dynasty.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist

GRIGORI RASPUTIN: faith healer, mad monk, priapic charlatan, resilient victim of assassination . . . and family man? Kathryn Harrison tackles all his identities in her new novel, "Enchantments." This splendid and surprising book circles through time and around stories both real and imagined, lending a tender perspective to familiar historical events as experienced by two central characters - Rasputin's daughter Maria, known as Masha, and Alyosha, the hemophiliac Romanov heir - whose physical and emotional suffering acutely remind us of the human lives behind the legends. Although Rasputin has been the subject of many books and much speculation, little notice has been paid to the fact that he was married and had three legitimate children. Instead, attention has been concentrated on certain questions: Was he bilking the Romanovs? Was he possessed of real powers of healing? Was he the pious czarina's illicit lover? And why was he so hard to kill? The man is generally presented as a libidinous lone wolf, happy to take advantage of the aristocratic women who, once he gained the favor of the Romanovs, proceeded to fling themselves at him, despite his appalling lack of hygiene. A poor peasant, he emerged from the steppes of Siberia claiming to have seen an image of the Virgin clothed in living animals and surrounded by butterflies. Thereafter, as Harrison's Masha puts it, "All of life was dull and dark when measured against visionary ecstasy." In St. Petersburg, in a court already fascinated with the supernatural, Rasputin became a fashionable novelty. He seems to have treated his patients by employing a sort of hypnosis, breaking the cycle of pain by persuading the rest of the body to stop tensing against it, a technique used by modern pain therapists. The czarina, desperate to save her son, decided that Rasputin alone could cure young Alyosha's bouts of agonized bleeding - and save the throne for the Romanovs. The dynasty's collapse and the strange figure at its heart are described for us by the tough yet sorrowful Masha, brought to St. Petersburg with her sister to improve her education and destined to became one of Alyosha's few friends. In a scene remembered late in the book, she accompanies her father on her "first real visit" to the Alexander Palace. While he visits the czarevitch, Masha is entertained by one of the boy's sisters, who displays the family's collection of Fabergé Easter eggs, including a pink model that reproduces in miniature the splendors of the grand estate surrounding the palace. Later, imprisoned with the Romanovs after her father's death and the czar's forced abdication, Masha will replicate Fabergé's delicately crafted flights of imagination by spinning a web of equally beguiling stories, enchanting Alyosha away from thoughts of his pain. Naturally, the boy is attracted to her, though their tentative erotic explorations can't lead far - nor does Masha want them to, fearfal that she will become "my father's daughter in the one way I dreaded." The Romanovs, a doomed family well represented by the glittering excess of that Fabergé egg, are contrasted with the often unsavory singularity of Masha's father. Alyosha, convinced he will be the last among these prisoners to die, is largely singular too: alone in his room, denied morphine lest he become addicted to it, and unable to share many of the simplest pleasures that comfort his sisters. He relies on Masha and her stories to provide a window to the wider world. Harrison presents Masha's often admittedly fantastic narration in an admirably refined style, using the labyrinthine structure of her own storytelling to mirror this young woman's approach to the truth. Masha's imagination guides her from descriptions of historical events into depictions of the inner lives of the two tragic figures, her father and Alyosha, who are closest to her. She also invents a love story for the czar and czarina. In Masha's telling, Nicholas is instantly enthralled by Alexandra and begs her to marry him, despite one great flaw: she walks beneath a visible cloud that is never entirely dissipated, a symbol of the hemophilia her only son has inherited from her, which has condemned him to a life of misery. In order to secure the future of the empire, Alyosha must discipline himself to try to appear healthy. But Masha tells of an afternoon when his stoic facade breaks down. Indulging in one of the family's favorite pastimes, riding a tea tray like a sled down a stairwell, he strikes his knee on the newel post and begins to bleed internally. The house is filled with his anguished screams. Yet Masha comes to wonder whether Alyosha might have deliberately injured himself in order to distract his family from their own troubles. Robust Rasputin is the opposite of the fragile Alyosha. His assassins invite him to dinner and feed him cyanide, which fails to have the desired effect. They shoot him, and still he lives. They crush his skull and throw him in the Neva, where he finally drowns. All this we know from the history books. Harrison makes it intimately memorable by presenting the aftermath, the grisly yet loving scene of Masha and the family servant (who is also Rasputin's paramour) washing his body and preparing it for burial - the simple actions of moving his frozen limbs, tending to his ragged fingernails, washing the blood from his hair and sewing up his head wound. Like most writers who choose historical figures as their subjects, Harrison has necessarily left out some details. Readers of "Enchantments" will not learn much of Masha's later life in Paris with an abusive husband, or be told that she had two children. When Rasputin's chief assassin wrote a book about the murder, she sued him, but without success. She found work as a circus performer and wrote memoirs of her own. She was employed in a shipyard, became an American citizen and married again - to a man named Gregory. The most enduring legend about the demise of imperial Russia is, of course, the belief that the youngest Romanov daughter, Anastasia, survived the massacre of her family. The most famous claimant turned up in the 1920s when some of the Fabergé eggs were being sold in the West. Recent forensic testing has determined that the real Anastasia's bones were in fact buried with those of her family. But while the dream of Romanov survival may be dead, Kathryn Harrison has given us something enduring - the last romantic figure of the era, a whip-cracking circus girl who was once an intimate part of a dying empire. Grigori Rasputin's daughter, living in the imperial residence, describes the demise of the Romanovs. Susann Cokal, the author of two novels, is director of the creative writing program at Virginia Commonwealth University.

During the final days of tsarist Russia, the "Mad Monk" Grigory Rasputin enchants the royal family with his healing powers-especially important because the young tsarevitch, Alyosha, suffers from hemophilia. Following Rasputin's murder, his two daughters are taken in by the doomed Romanovs. Eighteen-year-old Masha has enchanting powers as well and spends her time spinning tales for Alyosha to distract him from the constant pain of his disease and then from the chaos around them as the tsar is forced to abdicate and the family is placed under house arrest. Masha's stories reveal glimpses of Rasputin's life, bits of Russian history, and flights of fairy tales. Harrison (Envy) reveals the details of the turbulent era via the unique relationship between these tragic characters. VERDICT Though the narrative can be confusing as Masha's tales move rapidly from reality to fantasy, the ever-fascinating story of the fall of the Romanov dynasty will appeal to readers of historical fiction, especially those who have some understanding of the era's complex political issues. [See Prepub Alert, 10/1/11.]-Susanne Wells, MLS, Indianapolis (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.