The Bronze Horseman - Paullina Simons (The Bronze Simons #1)

The Bronze Horseman was a group read for the Unapologetic Romance Readers group in September, but I just got around to it this month.  I'm also slotting it in for the "military romance" category in the group's 2017 reading challenge.  Let me tell you, this book is a whopper of a romance--over 800 pages, and it looks like the two sequels are even longer!

What I have to give Simons credit for in this is her sense of time and place.  Set during the time leading up to and during the siege of Leningrad in World War II, the main characters are swept up in all of the hardship that the siege entails.  Starvation, freezing, bombings, deaths en masse--they suffer through it all.

But then, they're also infuriating people.  So not so much credit there.

The main characters are Tatiana Metanova and Alexander Belov.  They spy each other across the street one day during the white nights in a Leningrad summer, just as the war really moves into Russia, and fall in love immediately.  Problem: Alexander is dating Tatiana's older sister, Dasha.  This is the conflict that will fuel the first half of the book, as Tatiana is so scared to lose her sister's love and affection that she insists that Alexander keep dating her despite all of the trouble it causes everyone involved.  Tatiana's love for Dasha also apparently doesn't seem to go both ways, as Dasha uses Tatiana mercilessly and is fine with writing her off at the first available opportunity.  Of course, there's only one way a conflict like this can end, and the book then moves onto what's an incredibly slow start to a second half, where Tatiana and Alexander are reunited and proceed to have sex for about a hundred straight pages before diving back into the war and the siege.

The story is definitely much weaker in the time that Simons moved it away from Leningrad.  The siege provided such structure to the story, a time and place that people might not act as they otherwise would.  In Leningrad, Alexander's controlling behavior comes across as protective, especially because Tatiana is not only naive but possesses feathers for brains for much of the book--yes, she's seventeen, but in a time when "adolescence" wasn't really a thing (I mean, this is Soviet Russia, for crying out loud) she doesn't really have an excuse to continue being as dumb as she is for as long as she is, and miraculously still alive.  In other circumstances, though, Alexander's behavior strikes me as downright abusive, and doesn't bode well for the future.  He's also ruthless with using Tatiana for his own gains, especially because he knows what's likely to happen to her down the road because of his own background.  And then there's Alexander's "best friend" Dimitri, who is vile in his own special way.  Tatiana doesn't mean to be vile--in fact, I firmly believe she has a good heart, and that's the only thing that saves her character from being absolutely death-worthy--but ultimately, this is a book about terrible people doing terrible things to each other, and basically getting away with it because of the war pressing in on them from literally all sides.

There are two more books to this series, and geeze, I have no idea how much more wringing Simons can put these people through, especially given how the book ended.  It's like a train wreck--absolutely terrible, not in writing but in happenings, and yet it's so impossible to look away.  I do intend to continue reading this series, but oh man, I just don't know where it's gonna go.

3.5 stars out of 5.