Small-sized reviews, raves, and recommendations.

In 1916, Petrograd is awash with revolutionary fervor and a tuberculosis epidemic. Mariya Sokolova, daughter of a disgraced general, struggles with life. Her widowed mother contends with the deadly TB, along with being saddled with gambling debts accrued from her dead husband. Forced to beg on the street, she is accosted and sexually harassed by a Petrograd cop. But a ray of light appears in an employment opportunity she discovers. Working as a lab assistant for the handsome, moody, and, occasionally, emotionally unhinged, Dr. Nikolas Rodin, she is finally able to help the family claw its way out of crippling financial debt.

The Lab Assistant by Natalia Loya is a riveting page-turner. Loya, a lawyer, guitarist, and author, is a masterful storyteller, piling on the stakes for our hapless protagonist. She finds herself falling in love with the elusive and strange Dr. Rodin. The brilliant Dr. Rodin is working on a cure for tuberculosis, but has to deal with finding enough funding and having the proper equipment. As the local political situation slowly unravels, Mariya gets hit with personal crises of her own. She finds out her sister is involving herself with the Bolsheviks. (Not without good cause.) Mariya’s family is in the impossible position of being bankrupted aristocrats. Titled, but essentially penniless, they routinely cannibalize a dwindling dowry set aside for Mariya’s youngest sister. As financially crippled, they can find common cause with the Bolsheviks, but as nobles, they could be potential targets after a revolutionary victory.

On top of discovering her sister’s activities, Mariya also finds out the details of her mother’s living arrangements. Offered the apartment as a pap for their father’s misdeeds, Mariya finds out they can only keep the apartment if her mother stays alive. When she finds this out, her mother is getting sicker by the day. Dr. Rodin has a possible cure, but it is untested on human subjects and could possibly kill the subject. Mariya has to make a tough choice. The matter is complicated by Dr. Rodin’s bizarre personality. His moods can switch in an instant. Beneath the intellectual rigor and seductive charm lay an elusive violence. Who is he, really? Does he have mental problems? Is this a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde situation? Is he possessed by the Devil or beholden to something beyond the normal bounds of scientific inquiry?

The Lab Assistant offers the narrative velocity of a thriller and a highly emotional roller coaster of an office romance. (Or, in this case, a medical laboratory.) As Bolshevik revolutionaries threaten to overturn the established political order and Mariya’s mother battles tuberculosis, Mariya has to fight her natural instinct to lay low and obey her traditional upbringing. But emotions run amok, love and lust and anger and fear intermingling in a witch’s brew of desperation and desire. While Loya is an accomplished storyteller, The Lab Assistant’s weakness is in the writing itself. In an otherwise entertaining romance, the writing can sometimes feel stilted and belabored. Since this is her first novel, these faults can be given a pass. It will be fascinating seeing what future stories Loya has to tell.