Maya and Natasha

• Author: Elyse Durham
• Genre: Historical Fiction
• Publication Date: February 18, 2025
• Publisher: HarperAudio

Thank you to NetGalley and Harper Collins for providing me with an audiobook ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This stunning debut novel set in the fascinating world of Cold War Soviet ballet follows the fates of twin sisters whose bond is competitive, complicated, but never broken.

Maya and Natasha are twin sisters born in the midst of the Siege of Leningrad in 1941 and immediately abandoned by their mother, a prima ballerina at the Kirov Ballet who would rather die than not dance. Taken in by their mother’s best friend at the Kirov, the girls are raised to be dancers themselves. The Vaganova Ballet Academy—and the totalitarian Soviet regime—is the only world they know.

In 1958, now seniors at the Vaganova at the height of the Cold War, all Maya and Natasha and their classmates want is to dance with the Kirov, and to join the company on its tour to America next year. But a new law from the Kremlin upends Maya and Natasha’s due to fears of defection, family members may no longer travel abroad together. The Kirov can only accept one of them.

Maya, long accustomed to living in her sister’s shadow, accepts her bitter fate, until a new dance partner inspires her to dream bigger and practice harder. For the first time—and at the cruelest possible moment—the sisters are equally matched. And then one sister betrays the other, altering their lives forever and splitting them in two, though neither will stray far from the other’s orbit.

As one of the twins pursues her ballet career and experiences a world outside Russia for the first time, the other is cast in an epic film adaptation of War and Peace, produced and financed by the Soviet State. As the Cold War heats up, Maya and Natasha must confront their to East versus West; to the government that saved them versus their dreams of freedom; and, always, to each other.

Every reader of historical fiction has places and times that they gravitate towards, and one of mine is Russia. I have always been fascinated by ballet, and combined with a view of what went on behind the Iron Curtain and the complex family dynamics that these twins shared, I couldn’t hit the request button fast enough.

To start with, I’m so glad that I read this as an audiobook. The narrator, Yelena Shmulenson, read this beautifully. She has the kind of pleasant voice that makes it easy to listen for long periods, and she pronounced the Russian words and names in the story perfectly, yet still had no detectable accent in English, not even using any type of regional terms. You know, like how they say “y’all” down south and “yous guys” in Jersey? She sounded like a native speaker for both languages, which isn’t always easy to do. However, her wonderful narration couldn’t outweigh some of the other things that I didn’t love as much about the book.

It follows the tale of a set of twins girls who was born on the eve of the siege of Leningrad to a ballerina mother who orphans them just after birth. The two girls are raised by a close friend of their mother, but there’s a weird thread of the friend having a crush on the girls’ mother, but aside from giving her the impetus to take care of her friend’s newborn babies, it was mentioned multiple times and didn’t really create any movement or further the plot. 

Despite being twins, there are some significant differences between them and the trajectory of their lives. They’re both brought up in the shadow of the great Kirov Ballet, and dream of becoming ballerinas. Growing up in the Vaganova Ballet Academy, the sisters practice and learn together, but it isn’t long before one outshines the other. And while they’re dreaming of being accepted to a ballet tour in America, the Soviet law dictates that only one family member can go abroad at a time for fear of defection.

For two girls who share everything except an equal amount of talent, it becomes clear which sister is going to be heading to America, and the other sister isn’t satisfied to stay in her sister’s shadow anymore. I was shocked at the lengths one of the sisters went to in order to sabotage her own twin. And I wasn’t surprised at all by the reaction of the sister who was sabotaged.

The girls grow from infants to young women, and readers get to see them change over the years. And while they’re completely different women, the voices of Maya and Natasha blended together for me. I kept having to remind myself which sister was which, because they didn’t really have anything else to differentiate their chapters. I was more invested in one sister than the other, but both of them wound up being morally gray. However, it isn’t their fault necessarily, the government pitted them against each other, and under a totalitarian dictatorship, individuals didn’t get a say in their own fates a lot of the time. 

Overall, this had so much potential to be an outstanding book, yet it never quite reached that. I had a really hard time with how similar the thoughts of both sisters were, and hoped that it would get better as I got further in the book. It didn’t. This was a fantastic expedition into Soviet Russia, and the way the state controlled every aspect of people’s lives, and how the people resisted when they were able to get away with it. You might enjoy this if you gravitate towards: fiction involving Soviet Russia, ballet, dance, and the complex bonds of family when they come up against the rules of the state.

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