Worst books I read this year (7th place) 
 After The Tsarina's Daughter it doesn't look all that bad, but still.... 
 This is NOT a Romanov fantasy, it is another YA stalker-boyfriend paranormal!! 
 I could have like this book except that it seemed a few areas weren't researched. First of all, Preble doesn't seem to get that Empress Alexandra was German and raised in England, remaining a foreigner all of her life. There seems to be few ways that she could have learned the Baba Yaga stories or gotten her hands on a Matryoshka doll. 
 The second thing is the name Etanovich. I get it that Preble wanted the guy to have a "Russian" name that sounded like his American name, but Etanovich is not a name. The -ovich suffix means"son of" and is used in patronymics, which are middle names, and occasionally in surnames (Shostakovich, Leontovich, etc.), but in Russia, patronymics are not first names and vice versa. I also didn't like that they talked way too much about sex and ex-boyfriends instead of the main story line. Because of that, I had trouble liking this book. 
 I did, however, begin writing my own version of this book called Thawing Maria, which uses the Danish tales Anastasia's grandmother would have known.