Really enjoyed this book. Great plot and engaging, believe characters. I was drawn right into the story. Would definitely recommend.

I am a huge fan of historical fiction and have grown to love books of varying times in the past. My problem with this book is that it was so slow. While being based on Svetlana’s journal, I think there should have been focus on more interesting matters.

I appreciated the fact that the author notes at the end admits how much of the book was fiction. Yes, it’s historical fiction, but I would expect there to be more historical fact that fiction!

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for my advanced review copy. All opinions and thoughts are my own.

I was really looking forward to reading this book, so I was bummed when it didn't turn out to be like I hoped. There wasn't much "historical" in this fiction. It really felt like a fiction novel. I was mostly bothered by the telling rather than showing aspect of it.

The review below was posted on my blog on May 22, 2019 at https://www.thecuecard.com/books/the-red-daughter-and-american-spy/

John Burnham Schwartz’s historical novel “The Red Daughter,” which follows the life and defection to the U.S. in 1967 of Svetlana Alliluyeva, the only daughter of Soviet despot Joseph Stalin’s, left quite a mark on me. Wow what a complex and conflicted woman and turbulent time in history — during the Cold War no less! Although quite a bit has been written before about Svetlana’s life — later known as Lana Evans — including a few memoirs by her and a notable 2015 biography by Rosemary Sullivan, this was my first foray into reading about Stalin’s daughter and the dynamics of her situation sort of blew me away.

At the height of the Cold War, apparently Stalin’s daughter, who sought to defect, was seen by many in the CIA and State Department as “too radioactive to handle, likely to upset the fragile balance of nuclear forces thought to be keeping the world, if only barely from self-annihilation.” But ultimately the U.S. chose not to turn away the “most important Soviet defector in our country’s history,” so notes the book.

The novel is told via Svetlana’s fictionalized journal entries, which alternate in chapters with those of Peter Horvath’s, a lawyer sent by the CIA to smuggle Svetlana into America, 14 years after her father, Stalin’s death. They keep in touch after her defection throughout their lives and that forms the gist of the narrative. Apparently in real life the lawyer was the author’s father and that’s how he came to write this story. Although, according to an Author’s Note at the back of the book, the character of Peter Horvath was much different than his father and did not become as involved with her.

Despite these embellishments between the two, the story seems to follow Svetlana’s life fairly closely. And my, did she come to live and move around quite a bit amid the U.S., Russia and England. She seemed a complex person who could be charismatic and bright as well as difficult and headstrong. She also seemed neither solely Russian or American but caught between East and West, feeling at times alienated by both.

Surely she made some disastrous decisions, which ended up haunting her the rest of her life. For one, Svetlana, at age 41, defected to the U.S. abruptly during a trip to India, leaving behind her children, ages 17 and 21 without warning, which left her with much remorse and longing ever after, as detailed in the book. Then while in the U.S., she joins a cult-like community run by architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s widow, which ends badly after a couple years. And later in 1984 she decides to revoke the West and return to living in the Soviet Union with her American child, which doesn’t exactly work out either. Oh vie, what was she thinking.

Despite these decisions, the story paints her a bit tragically and sympathetically as a figure who wished to escape her father’s infamous past (whose regime killed off many of her own relatives among the millions) and live her life on her own terms, which was never fully successful.

What I liked about it was that you really get a sense from the novel of the emotional weight of the Cold War and her decisions — her guilt as a mother for her acts — and how she couldn’t really escape her legacy. I felt sliced open just feeling the stress of all she struggled with, coming to this country like she did, as a spectacle, alone amid her circumstances. I thought the novel had some very well done passages that brought to life her mind-set and situation — making her perhaps not totally likable or forgivable but a complex figure in the clutches of history.

This was a fascinating account of the life of Stalin’s daughter. The author’s father in actuality was the attorney who accompanied Svetlana to the US, and maintained a lifelong friendship with her. The novel gives to the relationship a romantic nature, but the book is otherwise based on actual events.

Svetlana had a tortured relationship with Stalin, her despicable father, and she eventually fled to the US. Her life story was engrossing, and we learned of her relationships, marriages, children, and her difficulty with being the offspring of a monster.

Even more interesting was the fact that when Svetlana returned to the USSR in the 1980’s, people had forgotten Stalin’s horrific legacy, and had come to admire him. Yes, people were not taught the history of this monster who caused the death of an estimated 20 million people. History matters!

I’m grateful to have read this book provided by NetGalley in return for an honest review.

Unfortunately, I didn't enjoy this book. It sounded like one I would get lost in and enjoy, but I felt it didn't meet my expectations. I had to force myself to finish it because I kept hoping it would get better.

The Red Daughter is a novel about the daughter of Joseph Stalin. It is written as a collection of journal entries. I must say I was drawn in from the first page. I enjoyed reading a book from the perspective of Joseph Stalin's daughter and what life may have been like for her as well as her feelings. I highly recommend this book.

I would like to thank netgalley and the publisher for providing me with a copy free of charge. This is my honest and unbiased opinion of it.

The Red Daughter by John Burnham Schwartz is a recommended fictionalized historical account of the defection of Svetlana Alliluyeva, the daughter of Joseph Stalin.

In 1967 at the age of 41, Svetlana Alliluyeva defected and came to America, abandoning her children, 16 and 21, in Moscow. A lawyer, Peter Horvath, is recruited by the CIA to assist the State Department in smuggling her into the USA. Her instant notoriety gains her some fame, but she claims she wants to live a simple American life. After sending Svetlana numerous letters, the widow of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright finally persuades her to visit the cult-like community in Arizona at Taliesin West. She ends up quickly marrying again, has another child, and it ends badly. She increasingly turns to Peter for support.

The novel is a fictionalized account based on the files of the author’s father, Alan U. Schwartz, who was the lawyer who accompanied Svetlana Alliluyeva to the United States. Schwartz has used his father's notes and years of research to create this fictionalized story based on historical facts. What is clearly presented is that Svetlana was a tortured woman who, with her personal history, would have struggled with life to some extent no matter where she lived.

The technical quality writing is excellent. In the narrative, the course of Svetlana's life is based on known facts, but the emotions and feelings are all deductions. Fictional journal entries help develop her character while tell her past and present story. The novel is based on her life, but also has a huge heaping dose of added artistic license; so, the factual events of her life are captured, but the emotional turmoil is more of an extrapolation of what she might have been feeling or thinking. While reading the pacing and narrative felt uneven. Some parts of the novel soar and move quickly, others drag slowly along.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Random House Publishing Group.

http://www.shetreadssoftly.com/2019/05/the-red-daughter.html
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2810311667
https://www.librarything.com/work/22702888/book/168457480
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The Red Daughter was a disappointment. I love Schwartz's previous novels (especially The Commoner) so I was really excited to read his take on the life of Joseph Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, who left the USSR in the late 1960s, "defecting" to the United States. Svetlana was a fascinating (and extremely complicated) woman so historical fiction about her? Yes, please! But it's not historical fiction if you basically toss out all of the history--it's just fiction. And while there's nothing wrong with fiction, saying that it's rooted in history because the author's father was Svetlana's lawyer when she came to America doesn't make it historical fiction. I don't mind a few liberties--they are necessary, usually--but this is fiction with Svetlana's name stapled to it. I finished this wishing it had lived up to the blurb--and it's a shame because I feel like The Red Daughter would have been amazing if it did.

The Red Daughter is a fictionalization of the life in America of Svetlana Alliluyeva, written by the son of the lawyer who accompanied her to the US when she defected. I really enjoyed the Cold War setting and the (fictional) glimpses of such figures as Stalin, George Kennan, and Alliluyeva herself. I’m left a bit unsure about the mix of fact and fiction that I’ve just read, and that is somewhat unsettling. Alliluyeva herself was a complicated character, self-absorbed and incredibly damaged by her upbringing, yet trying to live life as a normal western woman during the late stages of the Cold War.

I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

The Red Daughter covers Svetlana Alliluyeva, the only daughter of Joseph Stalin. Was really looking forward to this read. Generally I enjoy historical fiction but I found the liberties that the author took very disappointing. Svetlana is a complex troubled individual with a compelling story without the embellishments that the author admits to taking.

I received an Advanced Reader Copy of this book from the publisher and am voluntarily reviewing it

Sigh. I so wanted to like this. Svetlana, based on her factual personal history alone, was a fascinating person. The author has written several novels I greatly enjoyed. Unfortunately, the mix didn't work here, largely due, I think to the format. Journals can be a great (even when they are imagined journals of a real person) way to tell a story but....Something was missing for me here. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. To be clear, however, while I did not enjoy this, fans of historical fiction and those interested in well, Stalin and his daughter, might find it interesting.

This book was... odd. The premise was interesting - I had never heard the story or even known that Stalin had a daughter. Her history is so intense and unusual that it has the makings of a great historical novel, but this just wasn’t that for me. Some of it was interesting and relatable, but mostly I didn’t really understand what the author was trying to get at. Why was there so much focus on her relationship with Peter? Why was there so much time spent on the Frank Lloyd Wright widow years, and so relatively little time spent on many other years of her life? To me, a historical novel about a real person is an opportunity to try to get inside that person’s head and create a narrative of what drove them. And this... didn’t illuminate Svetlana at all, even in a fictional way. In fact, I felt like the book skimmed over most of the major decisions of her life. We never understand why she entered into any of her marriages. We are told that she defected and left her children behind because she had a brief vision that she’d be freeing them by doing so. We are told she defected again impulsively because she suddenly decided she wanted to see them again, but then she spends basically no time trying to fix it before leaving again. I guess what it comes down to is that we are TOLD a lot about her but we are SHOWN very little, and so she never makes sense and I wasn’t compelled by the story.

Written in the style of a memoir, this is a novel about Joseph Stalin's only daughter, who defected to the US.

Perhaps due to the memoir style, there is a lot of "telling" rather than "showing", and the narrative feels very disjointed, hopping from one thing to the next and only briefly detailing important events in Svetlana's life that could have been used to really flesh out the characters and story.

I was really hoping this novel would give me great insight into a historical figure and subject matter I don't know much about but I feel like it didn't tell me much more than I could have learned from reading Svetlana's Wikipedia page.

Advanced review copy from publisher via NetGalley. My opinions are my own.

The best thing about this book for me was learning that Frank Lloyd Wright was Welsh [which, in all my research on the man, I somehow missed] and that knowledge further explained my draw to him [I am of Welsh descent]. The rest....OMG what a bunch of poorly written tripe.

At the end of the book, the author makes it clear [three times in fact], that this is a work of fiction. That there is actually very little <i>"historical"</i> accuracy in it at all. He basically took a real life character, a story that his father was briefly involved in [his father did indeed escort Svetlana from Zurich to the US, but that is where all that ends for his Dad] and her marriage to the heir apparent of FLW and then made up ALL. THE. REST. For a book that is being touted at "Historical Fiction", that is a lot of fiction that is not really balanced with the brief bits of history that we are barely shown. It would have served me [and anyone else who is interested in this book {and can I just tell you to RUN AWAY now?}] to just read the several excellent nonfiction [and ACCURATE] book about Svetlana's life' both in Russia and in the USA.

This book is told in "journal" form, with an "editor's note" at the beginning of what I am assuming is chapters and it is tedious and jumps around a lot. There are moments when you think you are going to get more - a bigger insight to just who Svetlana is and what makes her tick and then WHAM, all you get is more of the spoiled, depressed, deeply unhappy woman that the author has created to further his story along [it is MUCH better for her to be sad and tortured as to further her illicitness and stupidness with Peter] and eventually you realize that it is not enhancing the story at all or that finishing the book will benefit anyone.

I DID finish this - part of me kept hoping that it would get better. It did not. And all I feel right now is the feeling that I wasted two days that I could have been reading something else that was way more spectacular and amazing than this was.

Thank you too NetGalley and Random House for providing this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This is a fictional tale of Joseph Stalin’s only daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, based upon true facts of her life. We begin when she first left Moscow in 1967 to arrive in the United States and continues thru many years of her life before re-defecting back to Russia. The book is written by the son of the actual lawyer that escorted her to the U.S which does add a lot to the story.
This is a very well written story with a load of information. Unfortunately a lot of the information in here is not true and is based upon fictitious events. I wish the author would have kept it more to the facts and not embellished with his imagination. This is the first book I’ve read about Svetlana but I will say it did pick my interest, made me curious and I may just pick up another more true to life book on her life story.
I was given an advanced copy from Random House Publishing Group through Net Galley for my honest review, this one gets 4****’s for his writing, effort and research.

Svetlana Alliluyeva is the only daughter of the Soviet dictator, Joseph Stalin. Stalin was a brutal leader and millions of his own people died during his horrific reign. He was a cold, insensitive man. But he loved his little girl and called her “my little housekeeper”. Then Svetlana grew up and fell in love with a young man who her father didn’t like. He cruelly had the man arrested and deported to Siberia. Thus began the estrangement between Svetlana and her father.

In 1967, Svetlana decided to defect to the United States. She left behind her two children, I believe the daughter was 16 and the son was 22, if I remember correctly. The CIA sent a young lawyer, Peter Horvath, to smuggle her out of Russia. This was a huge and stressful decision on her part and led to much publicity here in the US and complete alienation by her children. All Svetlana wants is a peaceful American life away from her father’s evil name. She attempt to find that life in Princeton, NJ. When an invitation by the widow of architect Frank Lloyd Wright comes, she decides to see what Taliesin West is all about. She’s pulled into the cultist community there and exchanges one dictator in her life to another, the controlling Olgivana Lloyd Wright, who believes Svetlana has money that the community could use.

The book slightly covers Svetlana’s younger years but mostly concentrates on the time after her defection to America. Interestingly, the author’s father is the young lawyer who accompanied Svetlana to America. The author is given his father’s private papers to use so there are parts of actual letters in this book. However, the author departs from accurate history in several respects. I find it very odd that he chooses to invent a romantic interest between Svetlana and her lawyer, especially since that lawyer was Schwartz’s own father and the love triangle would have involved his mother. I can see that from a literary sense it was a good choice but I much prefer a historical novel more based on fact than fiction; otherwise, I would have given this sensitive novel 5 stars. It does seem that most of the book is factual, other than the change of some names and the switching of the sex of some children mentioned and of course the romantic relationship between Svetlana and Peter.

Svetlana’s life was certainly a tragic one and she’s a very sympathetic character. She struggles for so many years with her abandonment of her two oldest children. She’s a broken woman in many ways and my heart bled for her situation and her confusion. It’s a heart breaking, engrossing story and this author, being a very talented one, brings Svetlana back to life. I’ve always been very interested in the life of Frank Lloyd Wright and found that part of the book fascinating. Based on what I know of how Taliesin West was run after his death, I found all of that to be very believable. This historical novel has inspired me to read Svetlana’s own memoirs that have been published or possibly some biographies on her fascinating life.

Recommended.

The Red Daughter is a highly fictionalized account of a fairly well-known woman, Svetlana Allilyueva, who published two memoirs of her own describing her life as Stalin's only daughter. In addition, there was a pretty comprehensive biography of Ms. Allilyueva released a few years ago. If, like me, you're a reader who loves to Google the backstory, you will soon learn that names and genders of most of the main characters have been changed, and I found that both distracting and confusing. I understand this novel is historical FICTION, and I love historical fiction. But, it's very hard to fictionalize a person who is so well documented and easily researched and, for me, it was just too hard to suspend disbelief.

The publisher notes compared this book to "A Gentleman in Moscow," one of the best books I've read in the last five years. This novel is completely different. Very little of the story is tied to history. Instead, it's largely focused on relationships between Svetlana and her lovers and Svetlana and her children after defecting to the U.S. along with Svetlana's emotional struggles with her decision to defect. We learn almost nothing about what was happening in the USSR (or the U.S. for that matter) during the time periods reflected in the book, and what we do learn has very little context to the internal struggles Svetlana faces. She is always running from her past -- that much is clear -- but her story becomes very predictable as a woman with "daddy issues" and a dysfunctional upbringing that isn't all that unique or surprising. I never grew to like or dislike her because there wasn't enough there to make me care one way or another.

The book alternates between Svetlana's letters and notes from the "Editor" -- Svetlana's attorney who accompanies her into the U.S. and remains her close friend and more. These editorial notes are by far the best part of the book, raw with longing and regret for what could've been. And perhaps that's the best way I can describe my feelings of this book overall: regret for what could've been much more interesting and engaging.

She survived her life, which maybe under the circumstances is maybe sort of heroic.

John Burnham Schwartz takes liberty with his fictions, imagining the life of Josef Stalin’s daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva, as she defects from the communist state to America in 1967, leaving behind her son and daughter, carrying with her the stain of her father’s infamy. Always thereafter to be ‘a foreigner in every sense of the word’ having left her homeland, a terrible mother to the two children she abandoned, that even Americanizing herself through marriage, now Lana Peters can never remove the blood that runs through her veins. Though there is an electric current that runs between Svetlana and her young lawyer Peter, loosely based on the author’s own father, the meat of the novel is in the tragedy of being Stalin’s daughter, it is a poisonous legacy. The cruel truth behind her mother’s erasure, the rest of her people ‘exiled or in prison by her father’s decree’, aunts and uncles arrested and executed, even her own brother Yakov captured by the Nazis wasn’t worth a prisoner trade. Her father controlled her life, who she was permitted to fall in love with, the state too ever a watchful eye reporting back to Stalin, there wasn’t an emotion felt, a movement made that wasn’t under scrutiny. A caged child, fed a diet of lies, not even knowing the truth behind her mother’s death. Daring to fall in love with a Jewish filmmaker, which her father forbid it seems no shock he was sent to labor camps. There was an arranged marriage, producing her daughter Katya. There was a deep love for an ill Indian man, whom she met while in hospital for her own treatment, of course she wasn’t allowed to marry him. Within the novel as in life, she journeys to India to scatter his ashes upon his passing. With her father’s death, the only release was to make a new home, to become someone else and remaining in her homeland was an impossibility.

“Svetlana’s entry into our marital orbit was something neither Martha nor I ever recovered from. Our own personal Cold War, you might say…” of course the story fictionalized a romance between Peter and Svetlana, their intimacy a window into her unsettling life in America. It would be a spot of happiness were it true too. Here, she will never escape being her father’s daughter, not even by marrying Sid and giving birth to an American son. We follow her tortured path, living with rumors about her Russian children, Katya and Josef who have forsaken their mother (were barred really from speaking to her, as she was a traitor to the Motherland) and wonder will they ever reunite but knowing that if the ‘future has defected’, then the past keeps its grave hands upon her feet. We suffer with Peter, who can’t help but wonder at the woman behind the eyes and fall in love with her. A love cultivated in letters and visits. In 1984, Svetlana appears as a star of the international press conference at the Moscow offices of the Soviet Woman’s National Committee. With her son Yasha, she shockingly renounces her American citizenship. She was ready to unite her family at last, return to her now grown children, who needed her. It wasn’t to last, tumultuous winds were always blowing through her life and again she leaves her homeland.

It would do one good to research the real story behind Svetlana, but this was a fascinating novel regardless of how true to facts the author leaned. She did seek political asylum and she was invited by Frank Lloyd Wright’s widow to visit the studio in Scotsdale, she did marry an architect and have a child with him, but it was a daughter named Olga not a son. Looking her up, she seems like a very fascinating woman too. John Burnham Schwartz tells us in his author’s note that he used his father’s ‘expansive Svetlana file’ with original material as his father ( lawyer Alan U. Schwartz) did travel under CIA cover to escort Svetlana Alliluyeva, the only daughter of Josef Stalin into the United States. She was a part of his family, that much is fact, but it is a fictional novel and his father did not have a love affair with her. Living in the shadow of such a father as Stalin (undeniable monstrous) , one can only wonder at what went on inside of her, stuck between cultures, unable to shed the horrors of her father, removed from her children… it’s a hell of a life.

Publication Date: April 30, 2019

Random House

THE RED DAUGHTER, by John Burnham Schwartz, is a rich and layered reimagining of Svetlana Alliluyeva’s life as the only daughter of Joseph Stalin. Using multiple real sources as inspiration, Schwartz's book is a study of how familial legacy can affect one's life as an individual, a mother, and a spouse.
While telling the story of Svetlana Alliluyeva's life, Schwartz constantly reminds us that for Svetlana, someone is always watching her and Schwartz at times lulls the reader into forgetting it for a moment, only to jarringly have those piercing eyes of the world find their way back to Svetlana again and again. Schwartz's style also elicits sympathy at times for Svetlana, while at other moments she seems selfish and bullheaded. I'd like to think that reflected on who Svetlana was; someone who at times knows who she is and what she wants and at other times her emotions press her to make rash decisions regardless of who it affects. The point of view in the book shifts back and forth between Svetlana and the lawyer in the story,Peter Horvath, the lawyer that helped her escape from Russia. Schwartz uses the two point of views to help tell Svetlana's story, but also to add or subtract emotional resonance along the way.
It is sometimes hard as a reader to not have a conclusion or an ending to a story that feels complete. THE RED DAUGHTER felt incomplete to me, but after some contemplation, I was okay with that because it reflected Svetlana's life and her never feeling real contentment or resolution.