An unusual book which I found hard to work out where it was going – backwards and forwards between America and Russia in the 1920s and 30s – but in terms of story, all a bit confusing. That isn’t to say that I didn’t enjoy it, I did. It is also the first in a series because all I am sure is that the main character will try to get out of Russia but I can’t see what for other than to escape Beria which is probably enough!

This is an old-fashioned adventure-style story following Dawn or Aurora, depending on which country she is in, who has an amazing early life. Her mother was American and her father Russian and it is this mix that enables her to move between the two worlds. She travels on the railways in boxcars for free, totes tommy guns, works at a large world fair, becomes damaged by radiation, loses a baby that is not properly formed and along the way picks up knowledge about the world and people and how they work. By the end of the book she is in Russia, spying for Berria and concocting a female polo team, hence the title of the book, and looking for a way out.

When the Russians first met her they were convinced she was a spy because of her previous life. What they were really interested in was her knowledge of balloons and radiation – there was a race here to win although it ended in catastrophe for both sides. And it is this that leads us into the sciency part of the book all of which had a faintly steam-punk feel to me although it all probably quite true. Electron and protons are known, in fact there is a scientist with sons named after these terms, but neutrons have just been discovered. We can feel the looming threat of nuclear bombs.

This really is a whirlwind of a book. We move from the mud and squalor of the great fair in America to playing polo and being escorted by Patton at the ball. We have hunger and starvation and polo playing all existing next to each other in both countries, and so one of the dominant themes is rich and poor and how both are needed for the other to exist.

The writing is taut, dragging us along and there is plenty of description to draw us into the times:

By the time she had made it back to the kommunalka, a plenary meeting was under way in the kitchen to comtemplate the preparation of breakfast. . . . All beside the point, since even these people – three dozen hobos, refuges and grad students crammed into the commune – were not actually poor and hungry. Not by the standards of the wide world and especially not by those of Russia, whose silence hinted more eloquently than shouting newsreels of famine and mass death. Even in the midst of the Depression and on the edge of the Dust Bowl, there was plenty of food, if you didn’t mind biscuits and gravy and beans.

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I can’t imagine having a meeting to discuss what to have for breakfast every day.

To my surprise, I enjoyed this more than I thought I would having read up on the author and his previous books. The next in the series is out in May. I will join the queue in the library for it.