The Fifth Doll by Charlie N. Holmberg

I started wondering why I'm writing these blog posts about the books that I read. The internet is populated by so many wonderful and useful book sites. Goodreads, Literary Hub, Bookbub (recommended by my mother-in-law, Sharon), LibraryThing, and so many more book review sites exist, not even to mention Amazon.com, that it would seem that a teeny tiny little blog like this would be kind of ridiculous. But I have to be honest.

I don't write these book blog posts for you.
I write them for me.

I read so much that I actually forget my books, and quickly too.
These blog posts about books are almost entirely so that I can look back and think DANG, That was a great book; I'd forgotten!
😆

And I do do that! I've already forgotten about half of the books that I've reviewed already.  lol  I'll look back at a book and think, HEY, I forgot about that one!  Ridiculous and embarrassing to admit, but there you are.

So you, the reader, are the very fortunate beneficiaries of my terrible memory.

Before I look again at The Lathe of Heaven  by Ursula Le Guin I'm going to give you a quick taste of a quick little book I picked up from the library: The Fifth Doll  by Charlie N. Holmberg. Holmberg is fairly well known for her The Paper Magician series of fantasy books. I haven't read them at all and knew nothing about this author before this. If you've read The Paper Magician, I'd love to hear from you about it!

Instead, at my library, I was browsing and picked up The Fifth Doll, a small little book with the cover above with the colorful little matroyshka dolls. The description was so compelling I slapped it onto the pile of books I was bringing home to read...and it waited there on my living room table for about a week before I picked it up.

The Fifth Doll is fantasy or sci-fi, kind of a mixture. But even more, it reads like a Russian story of folklore or like a fable, which is cool. I've not always been a reader of sci-fi, and I certainly have not been a reader of fantasy. But as I get older, I enjoy the mind-stretching, the thought experiment of it all. In the case of this book, I read a couple of pages and thought, Nah, this isn't my cup of tea, and I started to put it down.

But I then thought, Wait a minute. What if it's a hidden gem?  Well, just a few pages later - I was hooked and could not wait to explore what was going on. Let me bring you in on a quick taste of the book.


Matrona is a very satisfied young woman living on the outskirts of a small, peaceful village with her parents. She and her parents had recently arranged a marriage with a young man from a good family in the village (Feodor) and Matrona was busy helping her parents with the milking of the cows and the churning of the butter and she was supporting her best friend who was about to give birth. A very simple and lovely life.

One day Matrona stumbles upon a paint brush on the street and she goes to return it to an elderly, rather isolating man in the village, Slava. Upon knocking on the door she hears sounds within the odd little house, though Slava does not answer her knocking, which cause her to be concerned for his safety. She enters Slava's house, going deeper into the house, as she hears sounds and fears that he is injured and in need of help.

What she finds, instead, is a bird making sounds. But also a peculiar little room with tables and shelves, all covered with wooden matroyshka dolls. Upon further inspection, she notices that each of the dolls is painted to resemble people in her little village. Matrona picks up a doll resembling her father and, accidentally, turns the two pieces that make up the doll...ever so slightly.

When she returns home, her father is behaving oddly, clumsily falling about, some confusion... After a bit, Matrona begins to wonder if the doll in his image has anything to do with her father's behavior.

Naturally she has to go back and open her own doll...so expect some magic, some dark magic, some secrets, and expect the whole down to blow wide open!



I'd love to give you another author to compare this writing style to but the only thing I can come up with is Æsop's fables. The deceptively simple writing, the pastoral setting, the magical surprises... The writing might also seem like a children's book at times, but maybe that is one style of fantasy writing...I don't know.

What I do know is that I was right. This book is a hidden gem!
I enjoyed it tremendously and recommend it! Plan on being surprised, plan on thinking you're figuring it out (you'll be wrong), and plan on finding it to be deceptively simple, but deliciously complicated too. Plan on enjoying a forbidden and surprising romance. Plan on having the entire village turned upside down. And plan on staying up too late to read just to figure out WHAT is going on!

For the simpleness of writing, for the surprises and the magic, and for the cool mystery, I give this book a rating of six stars. 
And that ain't bad, друг, Friend.