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?

NUBClub felt Mother Doll was a ok novel with basically down the middle votes from all readers. On the positive side, Apekina creates an interesting cosmology of bitter Russian ghosts that are trying to communicate with Zhenia, our modern protagonist, and in this Apekina creates a terrific character in Zhenia's great-grandmother, Irina. Much of the novel is taken up with Irina's stories as a young and naïve revolutionary in the early days of the Russian Revolution. Irina's tale is a terrific one of betrayals and shifting morals and Apekina uses Irina's guilt about her actions to create the plot. Watching Irina look for absolution from Zhenia allows us to explore the complexity of her experience and gives us a good frame to understand that conflict. However, the way these spirits communicate with Zhenia is through another character, Paul, who is a pet psychic who the spirits drive to tell their stories. The issue with the novel is that Paul has his own secondary story in the novel and it doesn't really connect with Zhenia's family history plot. Why do we spend so much time watching Paul's mental collapse? It's not really clear how it relates to the themes of either Zhenia's story about deciding what to do about her pregancy or Irina's guilty confession. We just felt that Paul's story didn't belong in the novel. When we add this up, Mother Doll isn't bad, but it's not a tight book. If the topic appeals to you, you'll have some fun reading it, but it's not one of the great works NUBClub has tackled.