Like the Russian nesting dolls that inspired it, this novel reveals layer after layer of poignant delights.
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.Pub Date: March 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781419770951
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Sweet, sharp, and satisfying.
Their daughter’s wedding stirs up uncomfortable memories for a divorced couple.
The day before the ceremony, the bride’s mother, Gail Baines, second in command at the Ashton School in Baltimore, learns that not only has she been passed over to replace the retiring headmistress, but the new recruit is bringing her deputy with her. The lack of people skills that have cost Gail this promotion are evident even in that initial scene; she’s a classic cranky Tyler protagonist, given to blurting out her opinions with little consideration for others’ feelings. Her first-person narration also reveals her to be touchingly vulnerable, convinced that daughter Debbie, prettier and more polished than she, will inevitably prefer husband-to-be Kenneth’s overbearing, better-off parents. Although her divorce from Max was amicable, Gail considers him a bit of a slacker, and isn’t best pleased when he turns up with a rescue cat in tow and says he has to stay with her because Kenneth is horribly allergic. A startling revelation from Debbie, fresh from her pre-wedding “Day of Beauty,” immediately divides the exes, who have very different opinions about how their daughter should handle this crisis. It also leads to Gail’s revelation of the infidelity that led to their divorce, though not in the way readers might imagine. Laid-back Max is the only fully fleshed character here other than Gail, and the novel is very short, but Tyler’s touch is as delicate, her empathy for human beings and all their quirks as evident in her 25th work of fiction as it was in her first, published an astonishing 60 years ago. Gail’s acerbic observations about the wedding and all its participants, her wistful memories of her odd-couple romance with Max, and her account of their enforced intimacy over the three days surrounding the wedding alternate to poignant effect. The closing pages offer a happy ending that feels true to the characters and utterly deserved.
Sweet, sharp, and satisfying.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9780593803486
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
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