Mannequin Girl: A Novel
Litman (The Last Chicken in America, 2007) transports readers to her home city, Moscow, during the 1980s in this portrait of a besieged Russian Jewish family. Kat is dizzy with joy at the prospect of beginning first grade at the school in which her glamorously bohemian, slightly dissident, theater-devoted parents teach. Instead, Kat is diagnosed with severe scoliosis and sent to a regimented school-sanatorium where over the years she makes enemies and friends while enduring a painful body cast and the staff’s attempts to straighten out her unconventional mind as well as her curved spine. Her parents—stunning, tempestuous Anechka; kind, dreamy Misha—are overwhelmed by Kat’s predicament, Anechka’s emotionally compounded health problems, and Misha’s mother’s dementia.  With surgical humor and supple sensitivity, Litman illuminates the struggles of  both the spinally challenged and the straight-backed within a microcosm of the twisted, ailing, malignantly anti-Semitic Soviet state, in which typical coming-of-age angst is amplified.  As teen Kat rebels, certain that no one will ever love her, Litman scrupulously traces a web of social and family conundrums in this strikingly lucid and affecting novel. --Donna Seaman