What I'm Reading
This weekend I read two books:
1. Skipping Christmas by John Grisham
I'm not a huge Grisham fan - even though a lot of his stories take place here in Memphis and they shoot a lot of his films here. I think he's a pretty good storyteller. I don't think he's a great writer. I've read a few of his things, but I don't rush out to buy the latest.
This book was cute enough. But it almost seemed like he was specifically writing it so that it could be made into a movie. I mean, come on! The falling off the roof thing? He was totally picturing Tim Allen when he wrote that.
2. The Kitchen Boy by Robert Alexander
This was an intriguing book about the final days of Russia's last tsarist family, Nicholas and Alexandra. It's a historical novel based on something Alexandra wrote in the last pages of her diary about their young kitchen boy, whom they called Leonka: "Suddenly Leonka Sednyov was fetched to go and see his uncle and flew off -wonder whether it's true and we shall see the boy back again!"
So the author got to thinking...what if there was a survivor of the brutal murders of July 16, 1918? What could he tell us? There was a series of secret rescue notes passed to the family- who wrote them? Was there really an escape planned, or was the Tsar being set up? And what of the missing suitcase hiding $5 million of Romanov jewels? Is it still buried in Siberia? Could he explain why two of the children's bodies were never found?
Their lives were so dramatic - their deaths so mysterious. Robert Alexander uses fiction to create an ending fit for a dynasty.
