Review: Minneapolis writer explores the inanimate friends who save us in 'A Council of Dolls'

Dolls play a significant role in Native American culture, and in "A Council of Dolls," Mona Susan Power's moving new novel, they give comfort to generations of Indigenous women struggling to connect with their history and themselves.

Three dolls and three women are at the center of this story, and the PEN award winner's narrative floats between the past and present as she writes about the historical events and generational trauma that inform the women's lives.

An enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, Power excavates her family history to imbue this novel with authenticity. Her mother's knowledge of the family stretched back to the late 1880s when Power's grandmother was alive. She and Power's grandfather were forced to attend the same infamous Pennsylvania boarding school where Cora, one of the women in this generation-spanning novel, is sent.

First, we meet Sissy, born in 1961, who spends her childhood fearing her mother, Lillian, who has an explosive temper and suffers from depression. The biggest comforts in her life are her loving, gentle father and a Black doll named Ethel. Like all the dolls we encounter in this novel, Ethel communicates with and comforts the children who love her.

Lillian's childhood toy is Mae, a secondhand Shirley Temple doll with whom she also forms a close connection. As a young girl, Lillian makes a supreme sacrifice by giving Mae to a dying friend, but she's rewarded when Mae, implausibly, returns to her while she's attending an Indian boarding school. When tragedy strikes Lillian's sister Blanche, Mae becomes Lillian's protector.

As Power, who lives in Minneapolis, takes us back in time we meet Cora, born in 1888. When she's 9, she's sent to boarding school in Pennsylvania, where the goal of the school's white administration is to "kill the Indian" inside every child.

While many children are either broken by or don't survive boarding school, Cora manages to thrive, even though her beloved buckskin doll Winona is incinerated with all her other possessions, soon after she arrives. But Winona, too, finds a way back to Cora.

Whether the dolls in this story really talk, or their voices are imagined by the devastated girls who love them, is immaterial. When Lillian is reunited with Mae she thinks "in all the stories I've read and heard about magic, people do best when they just believe."

Magic aside, it's the belief in the power of pushing back against racism and culture erasure that gives this hypnotic novel's characters the strength to move forward. In the end, this emotional story circles back to Sissy, now called Jesse, who — like dolls — is "alive without living," until she discovers storytelling's power to expose the truth.

Carol Memmott is a writer in Austin, Texas.

A Council of Dolls

By: Mona Susan Power.

Publisher: Mariner, 304 pages, $30.

Event: 7 p.m. Tue., Birchbark Bizhew, 1629 Hennepin Av. S., Mpls., #275. Free; register at birchbarkbooks.com.