r/Anastasiainfiction

I just saw this rare picture in one of the (many) "Anastasia" short novels they issued after the movie release. It follows narrowly the movie script, and if it sometimes cut some éléments (the full Raspoutine ark in the shortests books), it never creates new scenes.

So I am wondering if that "fun" reference to the Stephen King book "The Shining", where young Danny gets attacked by the big leafy animal topiaries outside of the Overlook Hotel, was actually considered in the "Anastasia" movie, leading to the Pont Alexandre III final showdown (we only see spiky vines attacking her in order to she gets here in the movie). I shall try to get my hand on one of the early scripts to check that!

(on the pictures order I posted, you see first attacking topiaries and then the topiaries coming to life at the top of the hedges, but you have to consider that the "top" pages (74-75) are before the "attack" pages(78-79))

I find this kid's existence in the Anastasia universe confusing to say the least.

His name is Prince Ivan, and he's shown as ruling from Moscow (setting him before Peter the Great), but he's also a Romanov? (Ludmilla says his ring that he gives to Bartok is a Romanov ring.) Except there weren't any ruling Romanovs named Ivan that I can find any records of. The link in the wiki for this character just takes you to a real life page of a relative of the first Romanov tsar who never ruled because they lost the election going on at that time. That... Seems... Like... A Stretch...

We also know (in addition to the fact he's supposed to be a Romanov) he can't be a young Ivan the terrible because Bartok has a signed portrait of that tsar as an adult.

Anyone have thoughts on this?

Who IS this kid? 😂

An interesting French (but it seems it got translated to Spanish so there might be an English version) story where a deeply loyal valet impersonated one of the guards to save her. The execution is pretty graphic...

The three books span on 80 years and tell her restless alternative story, where all of her ennemies wanted her to stay dead : other Romanov, Germany, former allies...

It was created by Ordas, Cothias, and Berr.

That book seems pretty popular. Haven't read it yet. It seems pretty moving. Anastasia is elderly in 1981, living in London, and is still traumatized.

Be careful, the Irish author John Boyne ranks himself in the "Terf" movement (like J.K. Rowling), so if that mattes to you and you don't want to give him money, you may want to find this book in a thrift shop, garage sale, on eBay... :>

If so, which one?

I had the one with her in rags with the dog that came with the child-sized "gold" necklace. I remember as a kid, the one I really originally wanted was the one with her in her Once Upon December Dress that came with a cassette tape of the song (God, I feel old saying that). But I think when I went to the actual store with my mom to buy it, I saw the other one came with the necklace and plastic dog and got more excited about that one, and that was the one I ended up begging for instead. I kind of regretted it afterwards (I was generally a frilly girly child who liked dolls in fancy puffy dresses 😂), but I still loved my doll to bits. Had her for years. I eventually gave her (and a Dimitri doll I also had) to another little girl when I was fifteen; that I really regret. I'm happy I gave that other little girl something new to play with, when I was too old to play myself, but if I could go back in time I'd keep the Anastasia ones for myself as a memory/display and have just given her my Hunchback of Notre Dame dolls (which I also gave her) and all my doll furniture. I've often wondered what became of those dolls. That little girl must be grown up now.

Anywho, I had a cousin growing up who had the Anastasia with the blue Paris Opera dress, which was gorgeous.

I don't know of anyone who had the tsar doll though. I actually didn't know it existed when I was a kid. I remember another cousin having a little plastic playset that included Tsar Nicholas but I never saw the full sized doll IRL. Seeing pictures of it now, I'm really confused why his eyes are BROWN. The tsar had blue eyes. Very strange choice.

The 1916 ball in the animated movie seems to be heavily inspired by the IRL 1903 costume ball (you can see various guests, little Anastasia, and what appears to be Alexandra all in 16th century costume). But the Tsar is wearing what he'd wear to an ordinary ball; I kind of wish the animators had taken inspiration from his actual 1903 costume, because it's really beautiful, especially colourized.

We could have just seen him in his regular regal uniform in the Once Upon a December scene and had him in costume during the beginning.

The movie is still gorgeous regardless, I just think it would have been a cool detail if they'd included it.

This seems to be a custom etsy doll, I couldn't find any more information on it besides this picture but she's too pretty not to share. I've never seen the live action version as a doll before.

Apart from books like I Was Anastasia (where the gimmick is asking readers to see both Anastasia Romanova's history and Anna Anderson's before revealing the truth), most fictional narratives of the life of Anastasia Romanova are very much stuck in middle grade and the younger corner of YA.

Part of the problem is I think the average book consumer (who isn't a Russian history buff, or a world war 1 history buff) has a preconceived notion that Anastasia is for "little girls". Likely the picture in their mind of her sans debunked Anna Anderson isn't the young lady of 17 she was when she died or the younger teen visiting hospital patients during the war, it's a little ten year old in formal portraits with a kokoshnik, it's little cartoon 8 year old Anastasia voiced by Kristen Dunst. So she gets labeled a little girl for little girls to read about.

And I think most publishers and marketers follow suit. No matter how mature the writing style is, any book with Anastasia as the main character will nearly always be pushed to YA or middle-grade. The narrative being adult women don't "read teenagers".

The thing is that's bogus.

Plenty of adult women read about teenagers all the time. How many adult women have exclusively read YA Fantasy or Romance, to the point where they're a bigger part of the audience than any actual young people? (Now there is an issue that a lot of these women do seem to write bad reviews for any book where teenagers act like actual teenagers versus the 20-something year of olds in high school they're imagining in their heads, but that is not a topic that needs to be covered in this post.)

Just because a book has a teenager protagonist doesn't mean it has to be FOR teenagers thematically. Which is something marketers are quietly ignoring these last two decades.

Sometimes there's an exception if the character is a teenager at the beginning of a book, but if she's not 30 with a "sexy love interest" by the end most adult presses won't publish it, insisting it's YA even when it's not.

Anastasia of course dies at seventeen. Unless it's a survival AU, she ain't fitting into that box publishers put their adult heroines in.

A historical adult novel about Anastasia CAN be marketed, I'd argue, but it absolutely would not fit marketable "fanfic tropes". That's been tried with books like The Romanov Oracle (which really has no historical basis apart from Anastasia's name being used) and it sucked. Similar to Hollywood not making original movies or films that aren't part of a franchise, it would definitely be a book that would have to take a risk/chance.

But I still think if anyone was willing to gamble on it, it could be amazing.

So, I'm not gonna lie, for something obviously touched with AI this cover actually looks kinda good, but I swear the faces, hair, and heads are from fan art of Anastasia and Dimitri from seven or eight years ago. I remember one commenter on the original posting that Anya's face in this art reminded her of the actress from Law and Order SVU.

Unfortunately I don't know who the original artist was or how to find them.

Hoping if I'm right about some author on Amazon stealing their work they might see this post. Hopefully they're still Anastasia fans and this will come up in their reddit suggestions or the suggestions of someone who knows them.

When (and perhaps where, I don't pretend/imagine it was the exact same everywhere) I was growing up, except for outliers like "Anastasia's Album" that not everyone knew about and had access to unless they were lucky enough their school library carried a copy, the only "Anastasia Romanova" books the average millennial child had were tie in media (picture or pop up, in most cases) to the 1997 film.

Which I think was why the Royal Diaries book we got in the 2000s was such a big deal. In a world where (especially if you didn't have much internet or library access, or someone to tell you you might enjoy Nicholas and Alexandra despite it being thick and from the 1960s) Anastasia was a (non)Disney princess first (unless you saw a usually very biased documentary about Anna Anderson on TV) and a real person second, Carolyn Meyer's little middle grade book was the first realistic/historical Anastasia kids got to know.

But then for a while there was a lull. It felt like Meyer's book was an outlier in historical fiction. We would get Rubies in the Snow in 2006 (which you CAN make the argument IS the superior Anastasia fictional diary book, but that's a topic for another post altogether) and The Diamond Secret as part of a fairytale retelling series in 2007/2008, but these weren't promoted and I don't think a lot of people even realised they'd ever existed/come out until years after the fact.

However I will never forget the gorgeous little boom of Anastasia fiction we had in the 2010s. Starting with Anastasia's Secret by Susanne Dunlap, Sarah Miller's The Lost Crown, and a NEW YA Anastasia book from none other than Carolyn Meyer herself (Anastasia and Her Sisters) came out in quick succession and were placed in prominent spots on the YA library shelves. Tsarina really had nothing to do with Anastasia but it got lumped in with that trend because of the Russian Revolution setting and Anastasia-like cover, and it's probably worth noting that the book (though it was published under a very obvious pseudonym) was actually by a very very popular teen fairytale retelling author at that time.

Then these books just... stopped... For a while.

I kind of thought towards the end of the decade we were on our way to a resurgence but with adult fiction since The Last Grand Duchess, The Secret Wife, The Lost Daughter, and I Was Anastasia were popping out very close to each other but it seems once the Romantasy trend took off and most women's historical fiction wanted to be Regency era to compete with Bridgerton and the resurgence of Jane Austen retellings, this trend once again faded before it could take off properly.

I'd love to see the trend swing back around again.

Yes.

Did I buy the dvd from a secondhand store anyway?

Also yes.

It's just bad in such a captivating way. Tsar Nicholas (who is a tuba in this, by the way) looks like Captain Crunch and Alexei is an accordion. An accordion with FRECKLES that eats ACTUAL FOOD. Anastasia is supposed to be a rip off of the Don Bluth version but honestly looks more like Ariel from the Little Mermaid. This thing haunts my nightmares. 😂

Also, to my fellow DVD owners, did anyone actually watch the bonus movie "Snow White and the Magic Mirror" this came with? I haven't. I keep telling myself I will someday then never do.

Because then while the sisters surviving in England in The Romanov Heiress THINK their brother is dead, he's really just chilling in New Zealand wrongly assuming he's the only one in the family who got rescued by somebody British.

I know the fictional timeline probably doesn't hold up at all under scrutiny, but it's still a nice thing to imagine, all five escaping.

I also like thinking that, eventually, in this hypothetical crossover, Alexei/Nicholas sees the old movies Anastasia produced after the events of The Romanov Impostor and immediately recognizes his sister's handiwork.

I'm a sucker for a happy ending even if it makes zero sense. 😁

😂

Anastasia does feature as a mention at the beginning, as she's actually the cousin of the (fictional) MC, Zoya, but the Romanov portion of the story (right at the beginning before the revolution) centres more on Maria who Zoya is shown to be closest to. All OTMAA gets mentioned by her frequently though, and she ends up catching their measles while visiting Maria. This I thought was a pretty cool detail since OTMAA really did have the measles at that time IRL and it's why they couldn't leave the country.

Sadly, it's not a survival AU, and all of them do die in this book as in real life.

However if someone was to watch and really love the Don Bluth film and ask me for a book to read that was similar in tone but more adult (provided they'd already read The Diamond Secret by Suzanne Weyn or just wanted something longer and less YA), I would definitely recommend Zoya waaayyy before I'd recommend Anastasia by Sophie Lark or anything similar. Zoya I think would fit the tone of what an Anastasia fan would be looking for better than a romantasy retelling borrowing Anastasia's name. It's got a red-haired princess escaping the revolution and finding love and having to survive without her family wealth and try to be recognized by the surviving Romanovs she hasn't seen in years.

I think for a lot of readers looking for an Anastasia book Zoya would fit the bill. Especially if they like ballet.

That said, the first time I read Zoya, I personally did not like it, I didn't gel with the writing style at all and I thought Zoya's children (later in the book) were insufferable little brats. But I've softened to it a lot as I've gotten older especially as we get less and less mainstream Romanov or Romanov-like books. I see a lot of its merits now I didn't appreciate the first time.

So I feel comfortable and confident recommending it here.

(There's also a pretty well acted 1995 TV movie split into two parts based on the book which is really enjoyable.)

Frustratingly, however, you can't just use your next audible credit to enjoy it as there's currently NO AUDIOBOOK version for Zoya ANYWHERE! Which is a shame. Because of all Danielle Steel's books, this is the one I'd for sure get in that format if it was available for casual listening.