From the acclaimed author of Amelia Lost and The Lincolns comes a heartrending narrative nonfiction page-turner--and a perfect resource for meeting Common Core standards. When Russia's last tsar, Nicholas II, inherited the throne in 1894, he was unprepared to do so. With their four daughters (including Anastasia) and only son, a hemophiliac, Nicholas and his reclusive wife, Alexandra, buried their heads in the sand, living a life of opulence as World...

Traces the life of surgeon-poet Yury Zhivago before and during the Russian Revolution. Married to an upper-class girl who is devoted to him, yet he finds himself in love with an unfortunate woman who becomes his muse. Zhivago becomes torn between fidelity and passion. Sympathetic with the Bolshevik revolution, but shaken by the wars and purges, he struggles to retain his individualism as a humanist amid the spirit of collectivism.

Set during the height of the Russian Revolution and told in alternating voices, sixteen-year-old Evgenia--a peasant and proud member of the Bolshevik party--agrees to help a seventeen-year-old bourgeois girl traverse the war-torn countryside in search of safety, but Anna is harboring a secret that could cost them their lives. Includes historical note and author's note.