Sophy Roberts

Tedious. I suppose any book about the history of Siberia is going to spend a lot of time talking about incredible oppression and human suffering. Maybe that is why I couldn't get through it. It was well-written, but it didn't deliver what I was looking for. Amidst all that human suffering there was only a teeny weeny bit about pianos and that was what I had come for. It took me almost a month to get only half way through. I never wanted to pick the book up, and when I did, I wanted to put it back down. And so it went.… (more)

I will fully accept that I wasn't the target audience for this title. I got this from the library as my only travel writing book of the year to get a deeper sense of the Siberian places in the narrative, but the book was many miles wide and only a half-inch deep as the author dipped in and out of multiple places in every chapter. Inevitably part of her search for rare pianos was interrupted by visa problems, which is not unexpected, but this didn't properly add up to the book I hoped to read. The rating reflects that this was crisp and properly edited, and I did learn quite a few things about Russian history.… (more)