I didn’t get much reading done in February. I only read two novels, The Three Lives of Cate Kay, which I’ve already reviewed, and The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus by Emma Knight, which I review below.
Last month I promised a later review of The Last Russian Doll by Kristen Loesch, which I read in January but discussed with my book group in mid February. That review is also included here.
The Last Russian Doll by Kristen Loesch
- Penguin Random House, 2023
- Hardcover, 406 pages
- ISBN 978-0-593-54798-4
Once upon a time a little girl named Raisa lived with her mother, father, and sister in an apartment in Moscow. Then one night the father and sister were shot dead, and Raisa and her mother fled from Moscow and defected from Soviet Russia.
Now, 14 years later, the girl and her mother live in England. The girl, now an adult, has as English name, Rosemary “Rosie” White, and is engaged to Richard, of a wealthy English family. Her sickly mother is always drunk; she tells fairy-tale stories and collects porcelain dolls. Rosie remembers little of her life in Moscow except for flashes of visions of her murdered father and sister. When Rosie tries to ask her mother—Katya, now called Kathryn—about their past, Katya brushes her off and reverts to telling stories about her life as a ballerina with the Bolshoi Ballet.
The novel opens in the summer of 1991 when Rosie attends a reading in London by the famous Alexey Ivanov from his memoir The Last Bolshevik. Ivanov then hires Rosie as his research assistant on a summer project in Moscow, and she hopes this job will allow her to look into the still unresolved question of who killed her father and sister, and why.
This is a difficult novel to read, both practically and emotionally. On the practical level, I suggest keeping a pen and notebook handy while reading. Like many works of Russian literature, the characters’ names are complex and further complicated by the use of various nicknames; I found I sometimes had to deduce what character a nickname referred to from context, and writing this all down helped me to follow the story. The novel also unfolds across two timelines: the present (1991) and 20th century Russian history (1916-1991; the Russian revolution, the Bolshevik revolution, the rise and fall of the Soviet Union).
Related to the complexity of the story, a couple of people in my book group said they had listened to the audiobook and found it very confusing because the narration does not include transitions between chapters. The print version has clear signposts for transitions, as each chapter is labeled with the focus character, the location, and the date. I can only imagine how difficult it would be to follow the story without this information.
On the emotional level, although the novel isn’t overtly graphic, the atrocities and deprivations of the political and social upheavals of the period are difficult to read about. One that I particularly remember is how a woman peeled wallpaper off the walls so she could boil the paste in water to make broth as the only source of food available.
But do not be put off by the difficulties. The complex novel is well written and deals with major issues within a historical context. It is well worth the time and effort that reading it requires.
© 2025 by Mary Daniels Brown
The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus by Emma Knight
- Penguin Audio, 2025
- Narrated by Saskia Maarleveld
When Pen (short for Penelope) leaves home for university at the University of Edinburgh, she knows that her divorced parents back in Toronto have long been hiding some sort of secret from her. She hopes to find out what the secret might be in Edinburgh, where an old friend of her father’s—now a famous mystery novelist known as Lord Lennox—lives. When she begins to spend time at Lennox’s centuries-old estate, she is fascinated by his extended family and especially by his older son, who is a senior at the University of Edinburgh.
Near the beginning, the novel contains a reference to how a female octopus starves herself to death while tending her eggs until they hatch. (A drawback of audiobooks is that I can’t cite specific passages of text.) Discussions at the Lennox estate bring up several times the question of whether Pen wants to have children, and she always says that she doesn’t know.
Over the course of the novel Pen has the opportunity to observe several women and their approaches to marriage and motherhood. As the end approached, I realized that the novel’s title is a metaphor for motherhood. The setup feels clumsly, and I’m not sure if I would have recognized the theme without that early reference.
Nonetheless, Knight develops the characters of the various women in the novel adequately to demonstrate their differences. I enjoyed the story despite feeling it was obviously contrived to examine a particular issue. I did feel a bit sorry for Pen, who I thought was unduly pressured as a first-year university student to think about a question that could have waited at least a year or two.
Related Article:
Emma Knight’s ‘The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus’ TV Series in the Works at Amazon’s MGM Television
© 2025 by Mary Daniels Brown
