A Doll's Choice

5 Star Review

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Editorial Book Review:

By Fabiana Barbery

The title does not announce itself quietly. A Doll's Choice is a direct conversation with Ibsen, with the century and a half of women who have seen themselves in Nora's final door slam, and with the question that door left open: what happens after a woman chooses herself, and what does it cost to finally make that choice inside a life that was built around not making it?

Maribelle du Bellay begins as a different kind of woman than Nora, more calculating, more clear-eyed about what she is trading and why. A rural French girl whose beauty becomes her only viable currency, she works her way through the lower rungs of Parisian modeling before making the most rational decision she can see: marry Bertrand de Baux, wealthy and distinguished and decades her senior, and exchange passion for security. Burgess renders that choice with the specificity it deserves, neither condemning it nor romanticizing it. Belle knows exactly what she is doing, and she does it anyway, which is its own kind of dignity.

What she does not calculate is the slow erosion of self that follows. The diplomatic world of New York is rendered with the particular claustrophobia of a life where everything is beautiful and nothing belongs to you. As the years pass and Belle becomes increasingly ornamental in Bertrand's world, Burgess traces the quiet accumulation of loss that precedes the crisis. Then Zachary Conroy appears, and the carefully constructed life begins to fracture.

What gives the novel its genuine literary weight is that Burgess is not simply writing a romance or a cautionary tale. The choices Belle makes are presented as genuinely complex, genuinely costly, and never quite reducible to a lesson. The echo of Ibsen runs through the whole story without the book ever feeling derivative, because the question it is asking is both ancient and urgently contemporary.

For readers who want their literary fiction to carry real emotional stakes and their romance to carry real moral complexity, this is a richly satisfying novel.

About the Author

R.M. Burgess

RM Burgess grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, but following itinerant parental careers, was educated in India and England with stints in Nigeria, before completing graduate work at Cornell. As a successful professional researcher, Burgess writes academic articles for a living but is passionate about fiction. Burgess works in two genres, fantasy (the New Eartha Chronicles) and contemporary romance.

A licensed bike racer, marathon runner, sometime triathlete, keen skier and world traveler, Burgess currently resides in Philadelphia.