The Littlest Matryoshka by Corinne Demas Bliss

(Picture book.My mother and I have our own collections of Russian nesting dolls which seems to go back to our childhood days of stacking one inside the other. With its gestures to other tales and to magic realism, the volume is thoroughly beguiling in both word and image. The spirited parrot, a lightning-fast pace, droll illustrations, and a recipe for flan on the endpapers combine for a wondrous piece of bookmaking. Nanita is welcomed with glad cries by her father, and she attends her First Communion in soft slippers that he has made for her. The ranchero’s parrot (who sports an eyepatch from his pirate days) befriends Nanita, and they plot their escape, but not until the old woman teaches Nanita how to make flan. The ranchero takes her in, but the old woman takes her shoes and makes Nanita do all the work. The shoes have a spirit all their own, so when Nanita awakes she is far away by a house in the desert. Nanita has watched him work, so one night she makes a wonderful pair of shoes herself out of scraps in bright colors, and falls asleep still wearing them. Nanita’s father the shoemaker is so busy in their tiny Mexican town that he has no time to make her shoes, even though it will soon be her First Communion. In perfect harmony with Geeslin’s story Mathers captures the rose, purple, lemon-yellow, and desert-green of Mexico.

An author’s note on the history of matryoshkas is a welcome touch. Brown’s atmospheric but docile watercolors often view the matryoshka dolls from a distance, furthering the sense that the story is about events surrounding the dolls, instead of the dolls themselves. In the meantime, a young girl who has bought the rest of the set on sale charmingly tucks a little wad of cotton into the next-to-smallest doll so she won’t feel empty. It is an odyssey in which she has absolutely no active part, nor does she have reactions, for all she possesses is a blank matryoshka face. The outer doll, Anna, has been instructed by the maker to watch over her siblings-“Keep your sisters safe inside you”-but there is nothing she can do when the smallest doll, Nina, is accidentally brushed off the counter and unceremoniously kicked out the door. A set of the nesting dolls is carved in a Russian village and then sent to a toy shop in America. PLB 0-7868-2125-6 As is true for Pam Conrad’s Tub People, the events in a matryoshka doll’s life depend on external manipulations and circumstances in this case, it makes the story of a perilous journey fall somewhat flat.

The Littlest Matryoshka by Corinne Demas Bliss