Marina [Paperback]

WOW! What a punch this novel has in its own place of the three (so far! another one OKSANA comes out in August 2005) Heirs of Anton Series! I laughed and smiled and cried. You will too! Romance at its best as well as history and life's spiritual meaning from days gone by as well as drawing you into the Christian viewpoints which these authors hold most dear to them! It is so obvious and delightful! A GREAT read! I recommend them all. #1 EKATERINA, #2 NADIA, and now #3 MARINA. I have to wait for #4 OKSANA in August 2005!!

Marina is the third book of the Heirs of Anton Series. Each one of these books is outstanding--filled with intrigue and romance, and set in Russia. Marina is the book that answers a lot of questions from book #1, Ekaterina. I highly recommend this whole series. I found each one of the books fantastic!

Of all the books in this series, I have found this one the most difficult to read. The first two were written really badly, but at least the plots were plausible and interesting. This book is actually better written -- at least we don't have clothes screaming at us -- but suffers on several other fronts.

First, there's actually too much going on. There's a love story -- that's fine, all the other books in the series have a love interest -- but the two partisans are involved with what feels like A Cast of Thousands, so that you have to keep reading over previously-read material to figure out who is who, and who belongs to what group. There is the continuing lack of awareness of Orthodox culture, although I must give the authors credit for at least respecting the Russian Orthodox Church -- not many evangelicals would, and I appreciate that. There is quite a bit of involvement with the Nazi occupation of the Soviet Union; while this is historical fact, I felt that the details of the occupation kept getting in the way of the story, which was supposed to be about the disillusioned Marina and the American who reawakened her faith. (I think. It got to be tough to figure out the main point, with all this peripheral stuff going on.)

But the most glaring flaw in the book is its shallow character. This book takes place during the Second World War. At this point in history, Russia was firmly in the grip of the Bolsheviks, and Communism, with all its "workers of the world" philosophy, had taken hold to such an extent that Stalin actually had to enlist the aid of the Church to get people stirred up about being Russian -- they didn't want to go to war with their "fellow workers," and had to be reminded that they were Russians. None of this is anywhere in evidence in this book. There could have been so much more depth if the authors had made the Nazi element just a peripheral nuisance, and had focused on the partisan liaison, Edward Neumann (a German name, by the way?! Would I have trusted this guy with so many other Germans running around?!), and his solid Mennonite faith, pitted against the Russian partisan Marina and her bitterness about losing her new husband to the war.

All in all -- eh. I only finished it because I had choked my way through the first two, and by now I realize that all of them point the way to the fourth one, so I will have to read all the previous ones to understand that one. Sigh.

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