An immigrant’s coming-of-age tale done with brio.
Uprooted at age 7 from her home in the Ukraine as her family immigrates to the U.S. and a new life, Oksana Konnikova grows up permanently seeking her place in the world.
Tragicomic and bittersweet, Kuznetsova’s debut treads the not-unfamiliar ground of immigrant alienation. Oksana’s biography from infanthood to her 30s, delivered in snapshot chapters that can seem like short stories, is the tale of a smart, rebellious outsider for whom family is the only constant. Oksana’s first American home, which she shares with her mother, father, and cougar grandmother, is a crummy apartment in Florida where she begins both the business of assimilation and a habit of impulsive, questionable behavior. From here on, the story is dotted with relationships explored, boundaries tested, and a roller-coaster home life, all infused with Ukrainian and Russian culture that Oksana has scarcely known firsthand. Girlfriends, boyfriends, college, work, relocation from New York to the West Coast follow, and all the while Oksana—the darkly comic outsider with an urge to write—is yearning: “I wrote about how much my grandmother loved returning to the Motherland, how I wished there was a place, or maybe a person, that could make me feel at peace like that.” Eventually such a person does enter her life, although inevitably accompanied by complications, leading to the book’s standout section, "The Yalta Conference," in which Kuznetsova achieves her best synthesis of the novel’s touchstones: European literature and history; Oksana’s emotional quest; her unpredictability and sense of humor; and her love for her inexhaustibly lusty grandmother. At last, the “poor futureless child,” so labeled because a Jersey Shore fortuneteller could see nothing for young Oksana in her crystal ball, finds her identity and her future.
An immigrant’s coming-of-age tale done with brio.Pub Date: March 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-51187-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
A heartfelt tale of love too stubborn to surrender to human frailties.
When Chi Chi Donatelli gave famous crooner Saverio Armandonada a manicure on a 1930s New Jersey beach, little did she know that the swanky singer would change her life.
After his childhood sweetheart married another man, Saverio left the security of his job on the factory line in Detroit, earning his father’s disapproval but opening wide the door to success as a big-band singer. Along his way to stardom, Saverio changed his name to Tony Arma and discovered a talent for romancing—but never marrying—the ladies. But once he meets Chi Chi, his bachelor days are numbered. From a large, boisterous Italian family, Chi Chi is eager to have a life like Tony’s, with the freedom to sing and travel the country. She wants no part of marriage with its shackles. Soon Chi Chi and Tony are touring together, eventually developing a profitable shtick, with Chi Chi writing bestselling songs and Tony serenading them to dreamy audiences. It’s only a matter of time before Tony proposes. After all, unlike his other girls, Chi Chi offers Tony not only beauty and charm, but also the stability of a home. The lovers’ work in the entertainment industry gives way to a marriage blessed with babies yet held apart by war. Once reunited, Chi Chi’s independence and Tony’s philandering further fracture their marriage. But as Tony’s path wends from woman to woman, Chi Chi forges a new life on her own terms. A mistress of the sweeping family saga, bestselling author Trigiani (Kiss Carlo, 2017, etc.) sets Chi Chi and Tony’s lifelong love affair against the grand stage of World War II through the postwar boom years and the women’s liberation movement, tracing a society catching up with Chi Chi’s determination to control her own financial and personal freedom.
A heartfelt tale of love too stubborn to surrender to human frailties.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-231925-8
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
Bestselling Hannah (True Colors, 2009, etc.) sabotages a worthy effort with an overly neat resolution.
A Russian refugee’s terrible secret overshadows her family life.
Meredith, heir apparent to her family’s thriving Washington State apple enterprises, and Nina, a globetrotting photojournalist, grew up feeling marginalized by their mother. Anya saw her daughters as merely incidental to her grateful love for their father Evan, who rescued her from a German prison camp. The girls know neither their mother’s true age, nor the answers to several other mysteries: her color-blindness, her habit of hoarding food despite the family’s prosperity and the significance of her “winter garden” with its odd Cyrillic-inscribed columns. The only thawing in Anya’s mien occurs when she relates a fairy tale about a peasant girl who meets a prince and their struggles to live happily ever after during the reign of a tyrannical Black Knight. After Evan dies, the family comes unraveled: Anya shows signs of dementia; Nina and Meredith feud over whether to move Mom from her beloved dacha-style home, named Belye Nochi after the summer “white nights” of her native Leningrad (St. Petersburg). Anya, now elderly but of preternaturally youthful appearance—her white hair has been that way as long as the girls can remember—keeps babbling about leather belts boiled for soup, furniture broken up for firewood and other oddities. Prompted by her daughters’ snooping and a few vodka-driven dinners, she grudgingly divulges her story. She is not Anya, but Vera, sole survivor of a Russian family; her father, grandmother, mother, sister, husband and two children were all lost either to Stalin’s terror or during the German army’s siege of Leningrad. Anya’s chronicle of the 900-day siege, during which more than half a million civilians perished from hunger and cold, imparts new gravitas to the novel, easily overwhelming her daughters’ more conventional “issues.” The effect, however, is all but vitiated by a manipulative and contrived ending.
Bestselling Hannah (True Colors, 2009, etc.) sabotages a worthy effort with an overly neat resolution.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-36412-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2009
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