[Review] The Bronze Horseman - Paullina Simons

Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks
Price: € 15,95
Page count: 810
Language: English

Contents

Tatiana lives with her parents, grand-parents and her siblings in a two-room apartment in Leningrad during the second world war. It is on the morning when Russia enters the war against Germany that Tatiana meets Alexander which changes her life completely and together with her loved ones she tries to survive hunger, bombing and heartbreak.

My opinion

The Bronze Horseman is a very big book with over 800 pages but I was almost sure that I would like it after looking at a lot of reviews before getting it. Also the plot sounded fantastic to me and very interesting with the story being set in Leningrad under siege by the German army (St. Petersburg today). I really tend to love stories about the second world war and Germany under Hitler from different perspectives.

From the beginning the book sucked me in, Paullina Simons has a great writing style which is never boring. With bad writing styles I sometimes start to feel detached from the story and I cannot let myself be immersed in this world that I am reading about. But with this book I actually had a hard time to pull myself out again into the real world.

Of course the love story between Tatiana and Alexander is the most prominent topic in this book and it was the first romance that I bought myself in a long time.

The characters were far from flat in my opinion even though I cannot say that I was in love with the protagonist Tatiana all the time. Especially in the beginning I couldn´t relate to her at all because even though she was already sixteen years old she behaved more like a twelve-year-old. That made Alexander seem very much too old for her. He was very much grown up from the beginning and it seemed so strange to me that he would be attracted to a girl who hasn´t hit puberty in her mind yet. With the story progressing this improved but it never disappeared completely.

Alexander wasn´t always my favourite, either as he was not always respecting Tatiana enough from my modern point of view. Of course I cannot judge a character from 70 years ago by my standards regarding equality but in general I seem to have a big problem with authority in relationships.

Other than that I really want to know how this story continues, there are two more books to read and I am sure that I will get the second one very soon. I really enjoyed reading this book and it was the perfect read to cuddle up in bed with a cup of tea!

Résumé

This book is a very good love story and the setting added a lot for me personally. It is maybe not my favourite book but very very good all the same!

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