Review: Freedom and Illusion
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 10 6, 2013
Great books, great movies, great stories draw us into a world in which we are not familiar and we close the last page of the book, leave the cinema or story teller with a feeling that we have been a guest in that other place. This was the feeling I had as I accompanied 14 year old Marina on a journey through  her Moscow childhood at the time of that tectonic plate shifting change from the broken world of Soviet communism to the openness of Perestroika and the optimistic, if fragile promise of democracy.What Julia Gousseva achieves in "Moscow Dreams" is to get deep inside the head of Marina and show us this world in flux through a young woman's eyes - the appearance of McDonald's, that icon of Americana in the streets of Moscow, her first visit with her friend Nadia overshadowed by an attempted coup, tanks rolling down the streets in a scene that harks back to a dark past, the illusion of freedom immediately shattered.Marina is real, you can picture her clearly in your mind, but she is also a metaphor, an allegory, her own mood shifts and changes - physically, intellectually, psychologically, mirroring the changes in Russia itself, changes that, in the girl as well as the country, would never be reversed. Ms Gousseva clearly knows her subject and I enjoyed the small, intimate details that pepper the pages like an exotic spice and allowed me to get under Marina's skin.