The life and gruesome death of the last Tsar of Russia and his family have fascinated readers for nearly eight decades. Even more intriguing is speculation about the fate of his youngest daughter, Anastasia. Did she or didn’t she escape the assassins’ bullets? Hugh Brewster can’t give us a definite answer about that but he does an excellent job of filling in the background details. He has selected judiciously from the myriad pictures taken by the young Grand Duchess herself and added archival photos and newly shot colour pictures of Romanov palaces and artifacts to recreate Anastasia’s life from birth to that horrible moment when, 17 years later, the family was murdered in a small basement room by their Bolshevik guards.

As the title suggests, Anastasia relates much of her own story through photos and excerpts from letters. A text that is completely accessible to children but is also interesting to readers of all ages provides the rest. This is a family story: typical in its sibling sparrings, family trips to the seaside, the necessity of finishing schoolwork correctly; atypical in the opulence of the surroundings and the isolation of the family from the world outside the palace gates. But reality ultimately forces its way into Anastasia’s circumscribed world and Brewster deftly explains enough of the history behind the Tsar’s forced abdication to make the family’s imprisonment and later assassination comprehensible to readers with no background knowledge of the period. While the last chapter does not shrink from details of the family’s last hours, it doesn’t dwell on the horror. Brief mention is made of Anna Anderson, who claimed to be Anastasia, and of the DNA evidence that proved she wasn’t. Anastasia’s Album is engrossing and enjoyable as a picture storybook. The glossary and list of sources make it a useful reference tool as well.