The House with Chicken Legs

Marinka is the main character and first-person narrator of the novel. She is 12 years old in the narrative present and lives with her grandmother Baba in a house with chicken legs. Much of Marinka’s past is a mystery to her throughout the novel, but her narrative gradually reveals details of her secret personal history. Baba has raised Marinka to believe that her parents (Baba’s children) died in a house fire, which only Marinka survived. They too were Yagas, making the life of a Guardian Marinka’s destiny. Marinka later learns that not all of this is true. Marinka’s parents did die in a house fire, but the tragedy also killed Marinka when she was just a baby. Before they passed through The Gate, they told Baba the story of their lives and conveyed their deep love for Marinka. Baba “felt all their emotions as if they were [her] own” (101) and thus found it easy to raise Marinka as her kin when she came back through The Gate. Marinka is horrified to discover that she is in fact dead and Baba has been lying to her; this revelation augments her loneliness and entrapment and complicates her self-discovery journey.