Reviews

The Red Daughter by John Burnham Schwartz

readingmother's review against another edition

medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Loveable characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

erboe501's review against another edition

1.0

This is clearly marked as a novel on the cover, but I am still a little confused about how much of this is fabricated and how much taken from real life. The Editor's Notes, Letters, and Journal Entries don't help. Truth is, this book wasn't engaging enough for me to really bother to figure out the above anyway.

I had no idea that Stalin's daughter defected to the US, so learning the bare outlines of her story was interesting. But the dialogue was awkward, the plot slow, and the characters rather uninteresting even if dramatic. The most entertaining part was when Svetlana lived on Frank Lloyd Wright's compound.

I started listening to this on 1.5 time to get this finished faster.

kumipaul's review against another edition

2.0

What an uninteresting person Svetlana was. All she could do in this fictionalized memoir was make one bad decision after another to disrupt her family and make everyone around her uncomfortable. The only thing interesting was that she was Stalin's daughter, and she spent her life hiding from that (not surprisingly). I thought that the author was very capable of writing interesting sentences and paragraphs, but given that this is a fictionalized account, it would have been nice if he had found or created a compelling story from his imagination. There was no story. Where was the story? She got married, moved here, moved there, had affairs, moved again, moved back to Russia, moved out of Russia, moved again, died. Zzzzz.

reindeerbandit's review against another edition

2.0

i thought this was a true story, with the diary being hers and all. i loved it! then i found out it’s entirely a novelization, and now i don’t care for it at all. this author’s strong point isn’t fiction. skipped like months and years after leaving us on cliffhangers, the diary isn’t actually written the way any human would write to themselves, and it’s real damn weird the author imagined his dad having a torrid love affair with her. also, she had a hard enough life through no true fault of her own, can we tone it the fuck down with the “impressive women of history were actually whores,” please?

the only thing i liked was how different the two characters actually sounded. books love to do two separate perspectives, but the characters talk and think and sound identically. this one had a very clear difference between svet and ol’ horvath.

eweidl's review against another edition

emotional reflective sad slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

chava81's review against another edition

informative reflective sad medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

1.0

sherylcat's review against another edition

4.0

I actually enjoyed the author talk about the book more than the book, but I did like it. Her life just seemed pretty unhappy. Given that it was historical "fiction", I did find myself wondering which parts were history and which parts were fiction.

ziyuelan's review against another edition

3.0

I really had thought at first that this was a memoir or like the recollection of a real person’s life, but halfway through I started questioning why the kid in the book was a daughter and not a son and got really confused. I kinda just followed along as the story unfolded and finally realized it was a fictional recollection. Nonetheless this was an interesting read.

susanlbussey's review against another edition

3.0

In the late 1960's, the daughter of Stalin defected to the US. The father of this book's author was the lawyer who accompanied her on her flight to the US, and remained her friend until her death many years later.
I had no idea that this occurred until I read this book.
This is a work of fiction, evidently no affair took place, but the author used Svetlana's letters as the basis for the facts contained in the book.

shanwill210's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional informative reflective slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.25