Mother Doll
A Novel
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
*** BALCONES PRIZE FINALIST ***
Prize-winning author Katya Apekina’s Mother Doll is a sharp, kaleidoscopic novel about the shadow of trauma in Russian history that follows four generations of mothers and daughters
Punctuated with Apekina’s “wry observations and wicked sense of humor” (Los Angeles Times), Mother Doll is a family epic and meditation on motherhood, immigration, identity, and war.
Apekina’s second novel “is not only a harrowing examination of generational trauma, but a damn funny one" (Vogue, Best Books of 2024).
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?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
