Lost Roses: A Novel

Stars are a recurring motif throughout the novel, most often associated with Luba. While her birth name means “Love,” the name she takes at the end of the story, Lyra, is borrowed from a celestial constellation. Stars are a symbol of both hope in times of darkness and of intellectual ambition, as she makes it a priority from a very young age to learn about the celestial sphere.

The first mention of stars comes in the prologue, told from Luba’s perspective when she’s a very young girl. Eliza and Sofya bring her to a planetarium near the Eiffel Tower so she can see the stars spread across the sky in a controlled, heightened space. Although she is initially distrustful of Sofya and Eliza’s friendship, seeing Eliza as a rival for her sister’s attention, this act of kindness and sorority ultimately brings them together as a family: “As we lay there, the celestial world playing above us, it struck me that I had never lost my sister. Just acquired a spectacular new one” (4). Later, Luba finds a way to repay Sofya for this gift when she recreates the night sky on her ceiling with cut out bits of foil. These stars become symbolic of her own hope and inner light when their home is overtaken by bandits. All the lights are extinguished, leaving only the silver stars behind.

Luba works stars into her personal vernacular as a vow she repeats at moments of heightened significance throughout the novel: “I swear by God’s stars.” Over the course of the novel, this expression becomes a means of foreshadowing developments in the plot and of establishing Sofya’s character, ironically, as one who steers by her own stars and whose promises therefore cannot always be taken at face value. Early in the novel, when Luba says, “I swear by God’s stars,” Sofya admonishes her, saying “You only say that when you lie” (95). This interaction has a playful quality as each sister acknowledges an old habit. Later, Luba uses the same phrase when she promises Varinka to meet her and escape together—letting the reader know ahead of time that she has no intention of keeping her word. Examined closely, the expression contains a hint of its own untrustworthiness, as the stars themselves, as seen from Earth, are always shifting and rotating and never stay in one position for long. When this refrain appears one more time, as the very last line in the novel, it signals Luba’s liberation: “But I’ll keep my mind on my new American life, study hard my English, and not question a thing. I swear by God’s stars” (421). By her own stars, that is, she will embrace her new American life while remaining free to question everything, to remember her old Russian life with complex nostalgia, and to retain her Russian identity while growing into an American one.