Polostan

by Neal Stephenson

I bought this book in print at Jabberwocky Books in Nbpt, but I ended up mostly listening to the audiobook of it. I enjoyed it but may not continue the series.

It’s been a few weeks since I read this, and I didn’t take any notes, so here are things I remember (SPOILERS!):

The protagonist is a Russian girl originally named Aurora, after a battleship. Her father is a communist, her mother … trained ponies in Montana? Aurora goes to Montana, trains horses for the summer, and learns to play polo (which cavalries do to keep the horses in shape). She helps steal a bunch of tommy guns for the communists in America. Her father is killed when Patton and his men attack the Bonus Army near Washington, D.C. She meets a young Richard Feynman at the world’s fair, he ends up impregnating her, she tries to get an illegal abortion. The baby is stillborn, monstrous because of radiation from X-ray machines she used at the world’s fair, where she was helping sell footware. She gets captured by some psycho lady and her husband in the backwaters of Montana or Wyoming or something. Her kinfolk help her escape. She ends up back in Russia, at Magnitogorsk, and gets recruited as a spy after being tortured.

AI summary based on this:

• 1916: Dawn Rae Bjornberg is born in Montana to an American anarchist mother and a Russian communist father. Her father takes her to Soviet Russia, renames her Aurora, and she grows up amid revolution and political terror.
• Her mother later returns with her to Montana, where Aurora spends her teenage years riding horses, playing polo, and living with outlaw relatives.
• During the Great Depression, Aurora reunites with her father, helps his communist organizing, and survives the violent breakup of the Bonus Army protest, where he is killed.
• After a failed romance, an unwanted pregnancy, and a botched abortion, Aurora fakes her own death and returns to the Soviet Union.
• At Magnitogorsk, her incredible life story draws the attention of Soviet intelligence. After interrogation, Beria recruits her as a spy.
• Aurora begins undercover work in Moscow and is assigned to seduce a British journalist—but instead secretly asks him to help her escape the Soviet Union, ending the novel on a cliffhanger.