The Fabergé Girl - Ina Christova - ★★
AUTHOR: Ina Christova
GENRE: Historical Fiction
PUBLICATION DATE: December 2, 2024
RATING: 2 stars.
In a Nutshell: A historical fiction set in 1910s Russia and supposedly based on the life of Alma Pihl, a female jewellery designer at the House of Fabergé. The writing style and some of the plotting choices didn't work for me. Mine is an outlier review.
Plot Preview:
1909. St. Petersburg, Russia. Nineteen-year-old Alma longs to work as a jewellery designer in the House of Fabergé, but her family is against the idea. Alma has a tendency to get lost in her imagination when her mind is thinking of sketches, so her family is worried that she might be accused of witchcraft.
When a Finnish artisan named Knut, newly recruited at the House, gets Carl Fabergé to see Alma's work, Fabergé immediately offers her an apprenticeship, much to the dismay of the other employees. The only woman employee at the establishment, Alma now has to prove her worth. All this at a time when St. Petersburg is facing the winds of revolution, thanks to the Bolshevik discontent with poverty and the monarchy's discriminative practices.
The story, spanning several years, comes to us in Alma's third-person perspective.
On seeing the title and the cover of this book, I was immediately intrigued. I'd heard of the House of Fabergé, but wasn't aware of details beyond the famous Fabergé Egg. The blurb's indication that this was based on the life of the only female jewellery designer at the establishment further ensured my interest in the book. However, while the novel does cover this topic, the content didn't work much for me, partly because of the unexpected magical realism in what is supposed to be a true-life story and partly because of the plot development, which tackles too many things but only at a surface level.
As an avid historical fiction reader, I liked reading about the House of Fabergé and its extensive range of designs. I was quite impressed that they were renowned for much more than their artistic bejewelled Eggs. The details about the workshop and the store, the reputation of the brand, the esteemed clientele they catered to, and the jewellery and other collectibles they created, were great. However, it's important to remember that this isn't the story of Fabergé but the story of Alma. The intimate details of Fabergé's functioning come only in bits and pieces.
The book begins with Alma as an imaginative and aspiring young artist in 1909 (her age – nineteen – is not revealed until the 20% mark!), and continues till at least a decade ahead, though the last-mentioned year reference in the book is 1917. She sounds and acts naïve enough at the start of the book to justify her teen age, but she doesn’t seem to grow in correspondence with the years and the life-changing situations. I wish there had been better development to her character as she was the lynchpin of the story.
As the main protagonist struggling to make her dreams come true in a patriarchal world, Alma should have won my heart. However, her depiction is somewhat unsteady. At times, she's rebellious, secreting away to private rendezvous with a poor boy she's infatuated with or back-answering older men in authority. At other times, she's not able even to stand up for herself, and either faints or trembles or cries or shows some other mawkish reaction. She is so desperate to work at Fabergé, and yet, within just a day of getting the job, she has no qualms staying absent from her workplace without any notice. It was very tough to understand her personality and her motivations, especially her obsession with a person who broke her trust more than once.
This lack of consistency in character development applies even to Alma’s family members, who constantly sway between being supportive and being opposing of her aspirations. Alma's best friend Lylli could have been a fabulous character, but she doesn't get much page space. The same applies to Knut, whom we barely get to know intimately even though he's a crucial character in the story. Some characters’ behaviour feels so robotic that even important plot points don't appear to influence them to display emotions. All this ensures that there is a certain shallowness to the storyline, not because of the events but because of the somewhat flat characters and their unpredictable behaviour.
It takes some time to get a hang of the plot as it jumps directly into the action with no background. There are also plenty of time jumps, sometimes unfairly so. Just when I looked forward to what would happen next, the story jumped weeks or even months. Add to this the abrupt scene changes, leaving me befuddled at how the character(s) went from A to B.
The overly descriptive writing style with an abundance of adjectives and the tendency to go into flashbacks and ruminations even in between active scenes further added to my reading struggle. There is also a lot of melodrama in the writing, with almost every character reaction being on the hyper side, like Alma’s extreme shivering at the slightest sign of someone being upset with her. It reads like a cheap soap opera in some scenes.
I am fond of magical realism, but I certainly didn't expect to find it in a story that's claims to be based on a real historical woman’s life. Alma's imagination is truly wild, so almost every scene involves her mind going into a frenzy picturing her designs alive around her. Her visions were written in quite a detailed manner, which led to a sensory overload. I might have even enjoyed these had I been reading a fantastical story. But in a historical fiction novel, I was more interested in the factual than the hallucinatory, so the frequent and repetitive appearance of the visions broke my reading flow.
Beyond the Bolshevik Revolution, the story also touches upon witch-hunting in Russia and the Orthodox Church’s role in the atrocities against the accused women. While I would have loved to know more about how witch hunts were present even in Russia, the topic, no matter how fascinating, doesn’t fit into Alma’s real-life story. Moreover the topic isn't even covered in depth, thus not even offering us enough to know the whats, whens, and whys of the witchhunt. Some other historical points also weren't explained. For instance, I never figured out why Alma's family insisted on speaking French on certain occasions (they were of Finnish origin and residents of Russia!), or why the locals viewed Finns with antagonism. (Google helped me understand that Finland was a part of the Russian Empire until 1917. I hadn't known this. But it didn’t resolve my doubts.)
Most of the conversations in the book are stilted. Questions are asked and not answered, chats are initiated but not completed. At times, it even feels like two parallel conversations are going on, with each character talking only what they want and not listening to the other party, thereby offering no continuity to the flow of the scene. As such, it is a bit muddling and frustrating to follow. The sprinkling of Russian terms and endearments doesn't help as many of the meanings aren’t clear from context.
All of the above can still be attributed to personal reading preferences. After all, quite a few readers enjoy dramatic writing and love extended descriptions. However, my biggest disappointment, which I have not been able to quell despite my best attempt, is that the claim of this book’s being based on “the incredible true story of Alma Pihl, the only female jewellery designer at the House of Fabergé and her journey during the age of silver culture in St Petersburg” is inaccurate. Unlike what the line states, Alma wasn’t the only female jewellery designer at Fabergé, and was certainly not opposed by her family. The last name of “Pihl” doesn’t appear anywhere in the story. Alma’s younger years aren’t explained at all. Her drawing training under an artist working for Fabergé aren’t mentioned; instead, she is described as self-taught. The story dives deep into her ambition without much details of what led her to the same. Her father’s name and her husband’s name both don’t match reality. Some of the trials she faced after marriage and just after the revolution don’t even make it to the book. The final chapters zoom over her post-Russian life without offering any depth. Considering that this novel is almost 500 pages long, I would have expected the story to tell me more (and genuine) details of her life, but a substantial chunk of the word count is wasted on the hallucinations and the exaggerated emotions.
I wish this book had an author's note, detailing her writing choices. For a story where the fictional choices have veered so far away from the facts, it would have helped to know her thinking process, and might even have helped me process the anomalies with a more open mind.
All in all, I do think the book had the potential to be a memorable read about a lady whose name deserves a place in popular history. But the writing decisions didn’t suit my reading taste.
While this book comes with all the pitfalls of a debut work, it does show glimpses of the writer’s talent for vivid storytelling. I hope that her future novels go through a better developmental and proofing edits such that the intent and the content deliver equally.
That said, mine is very much an outlier opinion, and most readers seem to be as fascinated with this story as the Russians were with Fabergé artefacts. So please go through other reviews and take a better call on this work.
Recommended to those readers fond of historical fiction, and are okay with magical realism and embellishments being part of biographical fiction and also with an overly dramatic writing style. For me, all of these were red flags I couldn’t overlook.
My thanks to Iztok Zapad Publishing House for a complimentary copy of 'The Fabergé Girl'. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book. Sorry this didn't work out better.
The digital version of this book is currently available free to Kindle Unlimited subscribers.
For those interested in knowing more about the real Alma Pihl, this link contains some interesting information:
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