In the heart of Paris, in the heart of the community of Russian exiles, Zina and her grandmother Valya, run a tea room that is much better known as the place to have your fortune told. On the surface, life is good. The two women live comfortable lives among the émigrés and refugees. But as we get deeper into Olesya Salnikova Gilmore’s new novel, The Fortune Tellers of Rue Daru, we start to learn how brittle this life is. Zina is restless under her grandmother’s strictures. Valya is weary from carrying her secrets for so long. It only takes an invitation to blow up their facade.
Zina loves and is frustrated by her Baba Valya equally. Valya is the only family she has left after her mother was murdered when Zina was very young. Valya taught her how to brew tea and coffee, and also how to fake a seance. Valya has also taught Zina as much as she knows about her ability to read auras as she can; Valya refuses to teach Zina anything else about her affinity for fear of attracting evil spirits. So Zina wiles away her days in Samovar and sneaks off with her friend, Katya, in the meantime to enjoy life in Paris’s glittering eighth arrondissement of 1924. An invitation from a Princess Olga, a member of the old Russian aristocracy Valya adamantly keeps her distance from, changes everything. Princess Olga wants Zina to hold a seance for her father, known only as the Grand Duke, to determine if the long-missing man is truly dead.
Some of Baba Valya’s chapters take place in the past, giving us hints about the long history between her little family and that of the Grand Duke. In her other chapters, we see an increasingly frantic Valya trying to keep her finger in the proverbial dike. Zina’s first seance releases the deeply malevolent spirit of the Grand Duke in Samovar. Instead of enlisting her granddaughter in her efforts against the dead man, Valya is determined to fix everything herself. Her terror of the Grand Duke is palpable, but I chafed as much as Zina does at Valya’s absolute refusal to explain what the hell is going on. That said, The Fortune Tellers of Rue Daru would’ve been a lot shorter if she had.
It took me more than a few chapters to settle into The Fortune Tellers of Rue Daru. This book isn’t as atmospheric as previous books I’ve read by Gilmore, The Witch and the Tsar and The Haunting of Moscow House. Unlike those books, where the setting and wider world are as important as what the protagonists are up to, much of this novel takes place either inside Samovar or in the other world Zina accesses during her seances. Parc Monceau, the gorgeous four-hundred-year-old park where Zina meets another protagonist, is barely described at all and we only see Zina and Katya on the town once. I really wish Gilmore had expended as much effort on 1920s Paris as she did with the emotional tension between Zina, Valya, and the Grand Duke.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.
