I am demoting this book to two stars because after stewing for a couple of months, I've decided it annoys me. 
 The Kitchen Boy is not bad. The language of the narration is interesting. There is a stilted, halting, slightly awkward flow to the language which reminds me of how my husband (who lived in Russia until his mid-20s) would write in English. I'm not sure if Robert Alexander (a native English speaker) wrote like this on purpose or not. But in general I'm not very impressed with the style. 
 I've generally avoided reading fictional accounts of the Romanovs generally because there is so much documentation on who they were and what happened to them - and their story is so outrageous, sickening, and heartbreaking - that fiction just seems unnecessary. And there's a lot of EXTREMELY well-written nonfiction books on the subject. Just read Robert Massie's Nicholas and Alexandra, for god's sake. 
 Most of the book is confessional-style - the narrator (the kitchen boy) is spilling his guts to a tape recorder. There is a fairly predictable twist at the end and I don't really buy some of the reasoning that the characters made justifying the secrecy.