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    Blood Red Snow White: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Blood Red Snow White: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Blood Red Snow White: A Novel
    Ebook270 pages3 hours

    Blood Red Snow White: A Novel

    By Marcus Sedgwick

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    There never was a story that was happy through and through.

    When writer Arthur Ransome leaves his unhappy marriage in England and moves to Russia to work as a journalist, he has little idea of the violent revolution about to erupt. Unwittingly, he finds himself at its center, tapped by the British to report back on the Bolsheviks even as he becomes dangerously, romantically entangled with Trotsky's personal secretary.

    Both sides seek to use Arthur to gather and relay information for their own purposes . . . and both grow to suspect him of being a double agent. Arthur wants only to elope far from conflict with his beloved, but her Russian ties make leaving the country nearly impossible. And the more Arthur resists becoming a pawn, the more entrenched in the game he seems to become.

    Blood Red Snow White, a Soviet-era thriller from renowned author Marcus Sedgwick, is sure to keep readers on the edge of their seats.

    This title has Common Core connections.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateOct 25, 2016
    ISBN9781626725485
    Unavailable
    Blood Red Snow White: A Novel
    Author

    Marcus Sedgwick

    Marcus Sedgwick was one of this generation’s most lauded and highly regarded writers for children and young people, having published over forty books including acclaimed Midwinterblood and The Monsters We Deserve. He won multiple prestigious awards, most notably the Michael L. Printz Award, the Branford Boase Award, the BookTrust Teenage Prize and the Blue Peter Book Award.

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    Reviews for Blood Red Snow White

    3.5/5

    68 ratings10 reviews

    What did you think?

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Absolutely riveting quasi nonfictional account of journalist Arthur Ransome's experiences during the Russian Revolution. Sedgwick is a truly exceptional author and in his author's note he describes Blood Red, Snow White as "a work of fiction, but it is as closely based on the real events surrounding Ransome's time in revolutionary Russia as I could make it." The real and the fictional blend seamlessly and the story is effortless and captivating.
    • 4/5
      This book is fantastic. The way the story develops, and the fairy tale style adds another dimension to it. I was hooked from the start. It tells the story of Arthur Ransome (of Swallows and Amazons fame) and his time in Russia during the revolution. He led such an interesting life that I never knew about. Based on fact, but with a lot of fiction thrown in, the story is seamless. The events of the war are told in such a way that I really understood what was happening, and I learnt more about the subject than when I studied it for A Level. The chapter titles were very clever too, particularly towards the end.Very well put together, and enjoyable to read.
    • 3/5
      This was an interesting mix of fairytale and spy story with a side order of romance. A fictional interpretation of the time Arthur Ransome (author of Swallows and Amazons etc)spent as a spy for seemingly both the Bolsheviks and the British at the time of the Russian Revolution. He was certainly a brave chap in a very British, slightly cackhanded man abroad kinda way. The spy story bit is bookended by fairytale type sequences, the contrast of which doesn't work terribly well, but as Ransome himself started be writing fairytales about Russia, is at least apt. An interesting premise, made more so by the reality behind the fiction, and the British Secret Services reports on Ransome are reproduced at the end of the book.
    • 3/5
      When writer Arthur Ransome leaves his unhappy marriage in England and moves to Russia to work as a journalist, he has little idea of the violent revolution about to erupt. Unwittingly, he finds himself at its center, tapped by the British to report back on the Bolsheviks even as he becomes dangerously, romantically entangled with Trotsky's personal secretary. Both sides seek to use Arthur to gather and relay information for their own purposes . . . and both grow to suspect him of being a double agent. Arthur wants only to elope far from conflict with his beloved, but her Russian ties make leaving the country nearly impossible. And the more Arthur resists becoming a pawn, the more entrenched in the game he seems to become.
    • 4/5
      The story of British children's author Arthur Ransome, and his involvement in the Bolshevik revolution in russia while working as a reporter during WWI.
    • 5/5
      There has been renewed interest in the beloved children's author Arthur Ransome lately due to the publication of a new biography: The Last Englishman: The Double Life of Arthur Ransome by Roland Chambers. What many people don't know is that years before he wrote the children's classics, including Swallows and Amazons, for which he is so fondly remembered, he lived and worked in Russia at the time of the revolution. Published in 2007, Marcus Sedgwick's wonderful novel also tackles Ransome's time in Russia. Sedgwick is one of those teen authors whose books are crossover adult reads too, and I can't recommend this one highly enough - it has revolution and politics, spies and intrigue, romance and family drama, all steeped in Russian fairy tales. Stuck in a marriage where he didn't love his wife, Ransome ran away to Russia in 1913, although he regretted having to leave his daughter behind. There he taught himself the language and became a journalist on the Daily News at the start of the Great War. He also covered the 1917 revolutions, and was close to Lenin and Trotsky. There he met the real love of his life, Evgenia, who was Trotsky's personal secretary; they married eventually. He was somewhat sympathetic to the Bolshelvik cause, although remained loyal to his homeland, and this led to MI6 using him through their agent Bruce Lockhart (whose Memoirs of a British Agent - Being an account of the author's early life in many lands and of his official mission to Moscow in 1918 was a bestseller in the 1930s); MI5 also kept tabs on him for years. Ransome's occasional journeys to and from the UK were full of adventure and peril, especially the time the Estonians used him to deliver a secret armistice proposal to Litvinov in Moscow in 1919, where his good reputation with both sides was his life-saver. It was at the start of his self-imposed exile that he wrote his book Old Peter's Russian Tales: these are full of magical talismans, poor peasant folk on quests, cunning animals, greedy men and wicked stepmothers, and Baba Yaga of course. These moral tales are often dark and many don't have happy endings, but really get into the Russian psyche. Sedgwick's novelisation is no dry biography. He starts by using the fairy tales to tell the problems of the people, embodied by a great Russian bear spurred into action against the Tsar by two friends arguing in the forest - they are Lenin and Trotsky. This is superb scene-setting, and Ransome wanders into it and instantly falls in love with a woman stirring a pot on a stove in an office ... 'This is what you want,' she said, almost in a whisper. She nodded at the pot, and Arthur found himself drawn towards her. He looked inside. 'Potatoes,' she murmured, as if it were the most beautiful word in the world. Her eyes lit up and Arthur realised how very hungry he was. He stood no more than a weak moment's decision away from her, and looked into her eyes. This is what you want. And that was how the young writer found love, just when he had stopped looking for it. How can you not be reeled in by the utter romance in those words. Combined with all the derring do of the amateur spy, the author delivers a totally fabulous novel. Swallows and Amazons was his favourite childhood book, and when the National Archives released the files on Ransome, it was a story demanding to be told. Some of the fascinating telegrams from the archives are reproduced in the Appendix. Highly recommended indeed.
    • 4/5
      Well writen and a good story as well as lots of stuff about the first world war. It was a bit confusing though and I never totally understood all of what was going on.
    • 2/5
      This is not a book about the Russian Revolution. This is a book about Arthur Ransome.Ransome was the author of Swallows and Amazons (amongst other adventure stories) and a journalist during the Russian Revolution. The novel revolves around his life, his aquaintances and his problems, few of which relate to the Revolution. This fascinating historical event happens almost in the background, an afterthought. Although his moral dilemmas over whether to become a spy form a large part, there is little else regarding the Revolution. The execution of the Tsar and his family form a mere three lines, while the difficulties in travelling back and forth between England and Russia drag on forever.It is also clearly a children's book. The language is very, very simple and the few factual parts are toned down for easier understanding. There are no likeable characters.All in all, the novel provides a very basic understanding of the Russian Revolution, if you're prepared to slog through the meanderings of Arthur Ransome's troubles with his wife.
    • 3/5
      My views with regards to this novel are incredibly mixed.All three stories - especially A Russian Fairy Tale - were beautifully written and rich in symbolism. The image of the sleeping bear for the attitude of the proletariat and reoccurring contrast between red and white were both incredibly striking and memorable.It was also nice to read a story that presented an unbiased view of Bolshevism as so many simply use communists as villains. This novel made the appeal of communism very clear, showing clearly the improvements that it made to the lives of the peasantry, while also contrasting this to the violence and death that it also brought. Blood Red, Snow White has no hidden agenda. It portrays both sides and leaves the reader to come to their own decisions about whether it is bad or not.However, the novel also had a number of problems. Firstly, it was not really accessible to a reader with no knowledge of revolutionary Russia. Key players were name dropped and important events were given little introduction (the October Revolution was described in a sentence). There was also little development given to the cast and so they all came across as being rather flat and unsympathetic.All in all, I felt that the novel was an interesting curio for someone with an interest in Russian history but I'm not sure how much appeal it would have for anyone else.
    • 2/5
      disappointing - I'd skip this and read the non-fiction biography of Ransome "The Last Englishman" instead. The fairytale-style writing style in the first section was irritating and fictionalising the events didn't add much to them, in my opinion.