MOTHER DOLL, written by Katya Apekina, is perfectly titled. 

Following four generations of mothers and their overlapping generational trauma, Mother makes sense, of course. But it is the combination of Mother and Doll that really makes this accurate. The book’s structure feels like a set of never ending nesting dolls…one inside the other, inside the other…all their own dolls and also, all inside of one doll. 

Even as Irina holds a dying friend half way through the novel, the Greek-ish chorus of the novel comments:

We’re howling now. This all seems terribly sad. Who hasn’t held a doll in their lap, imagining it was a real girl, and who hasn’t held a real grip imagining she was a doll?

Who among us hasn’t known what it’s like to be abandoned by the only person who loves us? to have nobody. For eternity to be in a crowd but to always be lonely. (pg. 188)

Apekina delicately and expertly captures humor and grief in the way that real life allows both to live side by side. The choices of these characters are messy, honest and unapologetic. 

In the novel, as Zhenia’s marriage is dissolving, a child grows inside of her and her grandmother is dying. All the while, a ghost tracks her down from the afterlife through a medium, Paul, and it turns out to be Zhenia’s great-grandmother, Irina, who was a revolutionary in Russia. Irina uses her time of confessing to Zhenia as an attempt at finding peace and some sort of self-forgiveness for the sins of her time with the living. Meanwhile, the story Irina tells, deeply impacts Zhenia and nudges her forward in her own life bringing into focus what baggage she is expected to carry and of what baggage she can let go in order to find a loving connection with her own child.

You may want to stop right there and say—did you say ghost? I did. I threw it in there very casually. Somehow Katya draws the reader into believing that appearances from the afterlife are totally normal. Irina is very much alive while being dead and in that spiral of time, Apekina keeps this all feeling very grounded and real. 

The directness of Apekina’s sentences will take your breath away. And yet, there is poetry in her unrelenting nuance. I found my heart racing at times as revolutionary events unfold regarding the retelling of Irina’s story. I found myself tearing up while Zhenia and Irina navigated their personal losses. I also found myself laughing as Apekina spun her web of humor around every event in the most human of ways. 

Though it is not at all autobiographical, when I spoke with Katya, it became very clear to me that this book’s inspiration is deeply personal. You feel the author offering an intimate look at her own curiosities about motherhood, the structure of time, the inevitability of history drenching time, and the ways in which we are culpable when it comes to betrayal and misunderstanding. 

Deeply researched and beautifully intuited, this book is rich with great characters, profoundly heart-breaking history, and a beautifully crafted structure of nested narrative.