A review by jwinchell
A Year Without Mom by Dasha Tolstikova

3.0

This art is stunning--I could look at full page spreads of Dasha's self-portraits all day. And her depictions of cities and streets and living rooms and classrooms--complex and sparse and controlled and warm in places. The story is also good: Dasha's loneliness and angsty tween-ness comes through with earnestness and truth. But the part that was missing for me was context--an explanatory comma, if you will--about a more macro picture of what it meant to grow up in Moscow in the 90s. Without an informational note about the coup of Gorbachev or how emigration was a draw or why Yeltsin was so celebrated. Maybe my desire for this shows how much of an outsider I am, and maybe that's ok. But I've been thinking about the "explanatory comma" after listening to a great Code Switch episode, and here I think it would have helped draw a wider audience and promote greater understanding--even if it is annoying or tedious for the storyteller to do. But maybe my tween readers will connect to it nonetheless.