The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion and the Fall of Imperial Russia

First published in 2014, Candance Fleming’s The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion and the Fall of Imperial Russia is a young-adult nonfiction book detailing the last generation of Romanovs to rule Russia from 1894 to 1917, and the fall of Russia’s autocracy through the Russian Revolution. The Family Romanov won both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Young Adult Literature and the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for nonfiction. In The Family Romanov, Fleming combines her nonfiction narrative with quotations from primary sources such as Russian workers, writers, and nobles, creating a wide-ranging portrait of Russia in the first decades of the 20th century.

After the Prologue, which describes the vast disparity between rich and poor in turn-of-the-century Russia, The Family Romanov begins with the youth of Nicholas II, who will become the last member of the Romanov dynasty to rule Russia. Nicholas has a diminutive presence both physically and metaphorically, and his father does little to prepare him to take the throne. Nicholas falls in love with Princess Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt, who has a much more dominant personality than his own, and when Nicholas’s father dies in 1894, Nicholas marries Alix as quickly as possible, as he needs her guidance in his new role as tsar.