The Kitchen boy conveys notes back and forth concerning the rescue of the Romanovs. Nicholas is now addressed as “Citizen Romanov”.

Some of the guards are respectful, some hate the royal family and degrade them. Orthodox Russian priests and Sisters also try to help them.

They have other loyal retainers, a English doctor, a tutor, and a cook.

The family is lead to believe by a series of smuggled in letters that a group of 300 White Russian Officers was on their way to rescue them and pave the way for Nicholas to return as ruler. The hemophiliac heir Alexi, the same age as the Kitchen Boy, is the central concern of the family. The narrator speaks in great reverence for The Tsar, his wife and four daughters. He has lived for over 85 years under a false name in Chicago, much of it in a grand mansion. He is intent on producing a full account of what he experienced in Yekaterinburg to share with his 35 year old granddaughter. The man’s wife recently died, their only child, a son, was killed in an automobile wreck. The bodies were taken to the Koptyaki forest, where they were stripped and mutilated. Also killed that night were retainers who had accompanied them: notably Eugene Botkin, Anna Demidova, Alexei Trupp and Ivan Kharitonov ( T he Russian Imperial Romanov family ( Emperor Nicholas II, his wife Empress Alexandra and their five children: Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and Alexei) were shot and bayoneted to death by Communist revolutionaries under Yakov Yurovsky in Yekaterinburg on the night of 16–17 July 1918. The Kitchen Boy is structured as if it were a tape recording of a man, now 98 and living in Chicago who at age 14 was in Yekaterinburg (romanized as “ Ekaterinburg” serving as a kitchen boy to Tsar Nicholas and his family while they were held captive by the communists. The late Romanov period has been an interest of mine for a long time. Earlier I read A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles, which I loved. The Kitchen Boy is the second work fiction I read this month dealing with the collapse of the Romanov dynasty. The Kitchen Boy: A Novel of The Last Tsar by Robert Alexander - 2003

The Kitchen Boy by Robert Alexander