The Friendship Doll (review)

In 1927, Japan sent fifty-eight dolls, created by a master dollmaker, to the United States as a symbol of friendship between the two countries. Larson's novel offers a fictional account of one of the dolls, Miss Kanagawa, as she encounters four different girls: first Bunny, a young girl from a well-to-do New York family in 1928; next Lois, a girl living in suburban Chicago during the 1933 World's Fair; then Willie Mae, a poor "holler" girl living in rural Kentucky in 1937; and finally Lucy, a young girl who heads west from Oklahoma with her father during the Dust Bowl years. Narration shifts between third-person accounts of the girls and Miss Kanagawa's own voice, with font differentiating the two; she's richly judgmental of her young companions, but she forges a mystical connection with each that allows her to help and guide them. It may take readers a while to sort out the different voices and characters and the way they relate to one another, but once they grasp the structure, they'll find the events appealing; fans of historical fiction will particularly appreciate finding not one but four different specific historical contexts brought vividly to life. Of the characters, Miss Kanagawa is the least attractive; while she does demonstrate some growth over the course of the novel, she comes across largely as pompous and conceited, and it is thus difficult to accept her as the tale's unifying voice. The girls' stories, on the other hand, are drawn with honesty and imagination, and their four individual characters are well composed. An author's note identifies elements of the story that are based in fact (including the exchange of dolls between the Japanese and American governments in 1927) as well as providing more detail about each setting.