Leningrad Broke Me and I’d Do It Again

Leningrad, 1941, and Two People Who Really Should Not

Here’s the setup, and I’ll keep it clean because the joy of this book is watching it unfold. Tatiana Metanova is seventeen, still a little bit of a kid, living in a crowded Leningrad apartment with her sprawling extended family in the summer of 1941. She meets a soldier named Alexander on the street the day Germany invades the Soviet Union, and the catch, the thing that makes this book more than a simple wartime romance, is that Alexander is already involved with Tatiana’s older sister Dasha.

I know. I know how that sounds. A love triangle dressed up in a fur hat is still a love triangle. But Simons does something smart with it: she doesn’t let you off the hook. Dasha isn’t a cardboard obstacle, she’s genuinely lovable, genuinely trusting, and the guilt that eats at Tatiana for the entire first third of the book is not manufactured drama, it’s the actual moral center of the story. Alexander, for his part, is hiding something bigger than a crush: a background that could get him shot as a traitor if the wrong person finds out, which raises the stakes on every single interaction he has with anyone in a uniform.

Then the siege starts. And the book, which had been a slow-burn romance with some nice bread-and-tea domestic scenes, turns into something else entirely.

The Siege Chapters Are Some of the Best Writing About Hunger I’ve Ever Read

Look, I need to be honest about the structure here because a lot of reviews gloss over it. The first two hundred pages or so are a slow, sometimes frustratingly slow, courtship. There’s a lot of walking around Leningrad, a lot of stolen glances, a lot of Tatiana being coy in a way that occasionally made me want to shake her. If you’d told me on page 150 that I’d end up sobbing by page 500, I’d have been skeptical. The pacing genuinely drags here, and I think a sharper edit could have cut sixty or seventy pages without losing anything essential.

But then the Germans encircle the city, and Paullina Simons stops writing a romance novel and starts writing one of the most visceral famine narratives I’ve ever encountered in fiction. The blockade of Leningrad killed hundreds of thousands of civilians through starvation, and Simons does not soften a single bit of it. There’s a scene where the family debates whether to eat wallpaper paste because it’s made from a flour base, and I remember sitting with that image for a long time, unable to keep reading, unable to stop either. The scene with the can of condensed milk, which I won’t spoil, is the single most devastating piece of writing about scarcity and love I’ve read in a popular novel. It’s not subtle. It’s not supposed to be. It works anyway.

This is where the criticism I hear most often becomes fair: Alexander himself sometimes tips into being too perfect, too physically flawless, too endlessly capable, in a way that occasionally undercuts the grimness around him. He’s less a person than an ideal, and there were moments I wished Simons trusted her own war material enough to let her hero be smaller and more human. The prose, too, can be purple in places, especially in the romantic interludes, all heaving and gasping and meaningful stares. I rolled my eyes more than once.

And yet. And yet I finished this book on a red-eye flight with my overhead light the only one on in a dark cabin, crying quietly into an airline blanket over a scene involving a train platform, and I did not care that the prose had been overwrought forty pages earlier. That’s the tension of this book in a nutshell: it earns its emotional gut-punches even when you can see the seams.

Am I overrating this because I have a soft spot for tragic historical romance? Maybe. I’ve asked myself that. But I’ve reread the siege section twice since, skipping the slow opening both times, and it hits exactly as hard.

This is a book that understands hunger is the cruelest kind of war, because it turns love itself into a rationed thing.

About Paullina Simons

Paullina Simons was born in Leningrad herself, which explains why the siege chapters feel less like research and more like inherited memory. Her family emigrated when she was a kid, first to Europe and eventually to the United States, and she’s talked about how her grandmother’s stories from the blockade fed directly into this book. She’s since built a whole career spanning thrillers and other historical epics, but The Bronze Horseman trilogy remains the thing she’s most beloved for, the book that turned her into the kind of author readers get tattoos referencing. She writes long. She writes emotionally maximalist. She clearly does not care if you think that’s too much.

If This Wrecked You, Read These Next

Grab a copy here if you haven’t already, then chase it with:

• All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, for another WWII story that trusts small, specific details to carry enormous weight.
• City of Thieves by David Benioff, for the same siege of Leningrad from a darker, more darkly funny angle.
• A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles, if you want the sweep of Russian history without the starvation, more elegance, same devotion to place.
• Tatiana and Alexander, the direct sequel, if you need to know what happens next, though be warned the trilogy has its own vocal detractors.

For your book club

1. Did you find Tatiana’s guilt over Dasha convincing, or did it feel like an obstacle inserted to delay the romance?
2. Alexander is often described as almost too perfect. Does that undercut the realism of the war scenes around him, or does the contrast make the horror land harder?
3. Which siege scene affected you most, and why do you think it was that one specifically?
4. Simons was born in Leningrad. Does knowing that change how you read the hunger and rationing sections?
5. The book is famously slow to start. Would you have kept reading without knowing what was coming, or did the pacing almost lose you?