“She stood, with her doll beneath her arm, and she walked, across the blood-red floor, over her blood-red siblings, through the blood-red door, out of the blood-red house, all the way to the blood-red river. She forgot to wash her blood-red hands.”
Spanning the period from 1916 to 1993, Kristen Loesch’s The Last Russian Doll (Berkley 2023) covers an intense Russian history, from the October Revolution and the Russian Civil War, to the Great Purge and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union, but that history takes a backseat to the romance between the dashing rebel and the married royal. It’s an epic love story, dressed up like a family saga.
Reminding me of Everything’s Illuminated, the novel tells two stories – the intense love affair between Valentin Andreyev and Antonina (Tonya) Nikolayevna, and that of Rosie – a young woman studying at Oxford who joins a professor in Moscow as a research assistant. Rosie has ulterior motives; she wants to find the man who killed her father and sister, forcing her and her mother to flee their homeland a decade prior. (The sections are uneven; and Rosie’s quest to find a murderer is short-changed.)
At the center of the novel are porcelain dolls. Rosie’s mother collects them, and they are one of the few things she fled Russia with. After her mother dies, Rosie realizes items have been placed inside the heads of the dolls: scraps of paper carrying stories from Russia into England. The stories, the fairytales that had fed her childhood, are just as important as the dolls. Dolls first show up in 1917, when Tonya’s husband, a man who treats her as little more than a pretty trinket, gifts her a beautiful and terrifying porcelain doll made in her image.
I wish the history and some of the characters had been given more flesh; the romance is very large and defined, but that love story isn’t what’s carrying the plot, and when the plot graces the pages and the novel wraps up, it’s unsatisfying because it’s skeletal. Would I recommend it? Absolutely. It’s a perfectly okay book, especially for a debut, and better than a lot of what’s being published. But do I still wish for 150-200 more pages? Absolutely.
A Girl Named Tommi 