Secret Daughter of the Tsar by Jennifer Laam

I have given her all of my anxieties and insecurities and self-doubt and heartaches. I guess it’s not too surprising because I see now that she’s a stand-in for me. I abandoned the project, but got attached to her and wanted her to be the main character in THE SECRET DAUGHTER OF THE TSAR. Oh yes! My contemporary heroine, Veronica, started out as a secondary character in another novel. That is where the first hint of an idea for my novel began. And then I read another possible (if unlikely) tale of a Romanov survivor. We needed someone to walk away from the massacre of that family. What a bummer! I think the Anastasia fairy tale appeals to our need for survival stories. Around the same time I was really getting into Russian history, DNA proved that the most famous Anastasia pretender, Anna Anderson, definitely wasn’t Anastasia. I think we’re naturally drawn to the combination of beauty and tragedy and chaos. The last Romanovs intrigue me because frankly they were beautiful and the world they were born into was beautiful and then it all imploded around them.

Those sweeping changes in Russia fascinated me and I wanted to know more about the history behind it all. In the end, the coup failed and the Soviet Union ceased to exist. It occurred to me we could all go back to the “bad old days” of living under the threat of nuclear annihilation. But in 1991, there was an attempted coup. Gorbachev came in and carried out all his reforms and the Soviets almost seemed cuddly. I grew up at the tail end of the Cold War when the Soviets had become a tired military non-threat. How did you become interested in Russian history and the Romanovs? Jennifer seamlessly braids together the stories of three women - Veronica, Lena, and Charlotte - and imagines an alternate history for the Romanov family – one in which a secret fifth daughter, smuggled out of Russia before the revolution, continues the royal lineage to dramatic and unexpected consequences. I’ve been drooling over this cover since it was released. Her debut historical novel, THE SECRET DAUGHTER OF THE TSAR, releases today from St. I’m excited to welcome author Jennifer Laam to Between the Sheets today.

Secret Daughter of the Tsar by Jennifer Laam