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Summary
Summary
* A Most Anticipated Book of 2024 Selected By * The Millions * Chicago Review of Books * Hey Alma * Stylecaster * And Many More! *
Prize-winning author Katya Apekina's Mother Doll is a sharp and visceral nesting doll of a novel, about four generations of mothers and daughters and the inherited trauma cast by Russian history.
"A profoundly moving story . . . Strange, wild, offbeat, and hilarious. I absolutely loved it." --Lauren Groff
"Spellbinding, hallucinatory, and very funny . . . A rare achievement." --Elif Batuman
Zhenia is adrift in Los Angeles, pregnant with a baby her husband doesn't want, while her Russian grandmother and favorite person in the world is dying on the opposite coast. She's deeply disconnected from herself and her desires when she gets a strange call from Paul, a psychic medium who usually specializes in channeling dead pets, with a message from the other side. Zhenia's great-grandmother Irina, a Russian Revolutionary, has approached him from a cloud of ancestral grief, desperate to tell her story and receive absolution from Zhenia.
As Irina begins her confession with the help of a purgatorial chorus of grieving Russian ghosts, Zhenia awakens to aspects of herself she hadn't been willing to confront. But does either woman have what the other needs to understand their predicament? Or will Irina be stuck in limbo, with Zhenia plagued by ancestral trauma, and her children after her?
Ferociously funny and deeply moving, Mother Doll forces us to look at how painful secrets stamp themselves from one generation to the next. Katya Apekina's second novel is a family epic and a meditation on motherhood, immigration, identity, and war.
Author Notes
Katya Apekina is a novelist, screenwriter, and translator. Her debut novel, The Deeper the Water, the Uglier the Fish , was named a Best Book of 2018 by Kirkus , Buzzfeed, Lithub, and others, was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize, and has been translated into Spanish, Catalan, French, German, and Italian. She is the recipient of an Elizabeth George grant, an Olin Fellowship, the Alena Wilson prize, and a Third Year Fiction Fellowship from Washignton University in St. Louis, where she did her MFA. She has done residences at VCCA, Playa, Ucross, Art Omi: Writing, and Fondation Jan Michalski in Switzerland. Born in Moscow, she moved to the US when she was three years old and currently lives in Los Angeles. Mother Doll is her second novel.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Apekina (The Deeper the Water, the Uglier the Fish) turns the multigenerational family saga on its head with this sharply original and surprisingly witty tale of a young woman in contemporary Los Angeles, her dying grandmother in New York City, and their ancestor in revolutionary Russia. Zhenia, a 20-something translator based in California, is struggling to come to terms with her beloved grandmother Vera's dementia and terminal illness, and shamed by her mother for not traveling back east to help. Zhenia has also just told her husband that she's unexpectedly pregnant, and he's unhappy with the news. Then she receives a call from a stranger in New York named Paul, who tells her that her dead great-grandmother Irina needs to talk with her. Paul, a medium who normally specializes in pets, met Irina in an overpopulated afterworld, and has agreed to relay her story to Zhenia. A parallel narrative portrays this purgatory as an "undifferentiated cloud," where, in flashbacks, Irina remembers her passionate adolescence, when she was swayed to join the antimonarchist February Revolution of 1917 by one of her teachers. Now, via Paul, she seeks forgiveness from Zhenia for abandoning Vera in a Russian orphanage and other acts. Apekina avoids the ponderous tone of many historical novels by making Irina a thrillingly vital presence, and allows the parallels between her and her great-granddaughter as young pregnant women to emerge gradually and naturally. The result is a provocative vision of a world in which past and present are not as neatly separated as they appear. Agent: Bill Clegg, Clegg Agency. (Mar.)
Kirkus Review
A pregnant woman is contacted, via a medium, by her dead great-grandmother, who was a Russian revolutionary. Zhenia, frankly, is a mess. Feeling like a "helpless passenger in her own life," she works as a medical translator for Russians in Los Angeles. Her young marriage is wobbly: She has a history of infidelity and can't shake the feeling that her husband would rather have married someone else. Back home in Boston, Zhenia's beloved grandmother Vera is near death, in a near-vegetative state. Into this chaos, two events avalanche: First, Zhenia ends up pregnant by accident. Then, out of the blue, she's contacted by a New York psychic named Paul, who has a proposition for her. He's being urgently contacted by the spirit of Zhenia's mysterious great-grandmother Irina--Vera's mother--and he wants to relay her narrative to Zhenia in Russian, which he doesn't speak, so she can translate it into English. Apekina alternates between Zhenia's and Paul's increasingly desperate circumstances and the story that Irina tells about her own life with Paul as the mouthpiece. (Literally: Paul crosses into the "cloud of ancestral grief" that Irina exists in with a bunch of other chattering souls, and she opens his mouth and yells into his throat to tell her story to Zhenia.) The secrets that Irina reveals about her coming-of-age in a Jewish family during the Russian Revolution force Zhenia to re-examine her past, her present, and her future. In lesser hands, this narrative nesting-doll structure might have been merely a clever way of parsing intergenerational trauma or the impulse to explore family history as loved ones are born or pass away. But Apekina's keen portrayals of morally complicated women transcend any gimmickry, and her depictions of Petrograd in the early 20th century feel startlingly present. Like the Russian nesting dolls that inspired it, this novel reveals layer after layer of poignant delights. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
The Russian Revolution inspired hundreds of retellings, while today mothers provide grist for the mill of contemporary psychological relationship novels. Following her well-received debut, The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish, Apekina conflates these domains into a mélange of history, sexual affairs, and the afterlife and produces a tale of four generations of Russian women whose angst, betrayal, and desperation conclude with a striking reconciliation reminiscent of Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. Living in the Now Generation, Zhenia inherited the traumas of foremothers Irina, Vera, and Marina. Zhenia's hot, messy life worries her mother and grandmother. Up pops Great-Grandmother Irina from the afterlife, channeling her voice through an enterprising psychic. Over several months, Irina recounts her many unreconciled betrayals during the 1917 revolution, while Zhenia experiences her own betrayals, culminating in the birth of a son. VERDICT Imagining the afterlife has resulted in unforgettable recent novels like George Saunders's Lincoln in the Bardo. Apekina's hallucinatory use of occult communications transforms historical facts and emotional trauma into a phantasmagorical fable of Zhenia's and Irina's spiritual journeys. Balancing raucous hilarity with embedded pain, it may be the year's weirdest one-of-a-kind read.--Barbara Conaty
