Ambitious in its themes, this novel of the immigrant’s journey lacks focus and authority in the telling.
Shreiber’s historical novel traces a young woman’s journey from Soviet Leningrad to a film studio in Los Angeles.
Nadia Argo is coming of age in the late-1970s Soviet Union. Pampered by her parents, Boris and Lena, she is a rising star at the prestigious Leningrad University, a natural beauty, and a budding poet. But it’s the Brezhnev years, and Nadia is surrounded by deprivation, food shortages, and fellow citizens acting as spies. The daughter of a Jewish film director, Nadia could lose all of her privileges in a heartbeat. This is exactly what happens when Nadia’s fascination with her new neighbor (Victor Nabatov, a charismatic but secretive diplomat’s son) draws the unwelcome attention of the authorities. When Nadia and her mother request permission to emigrate following Boris’ death, the situation spirals out of control. They are forced out of the country and must rebuild their life in the U.S., surviving the dehumanizing early months in New York and Palo Alto, California, until Nadia finds her calling in Los Angeles, returning to her first love and her father’s legacy: the world of filmmaking. While the story is compelling, it takes a long time for the novel to find its rhythm. The early chapters are told from various, often peripheral characters’ points of view, making it difficult to grasp the main thread. The funniest and most compelling voice belongs to Yasha Lansky, a cinematographer and Nadia’s benefactor in Los Angeles, who rants, “Ten years in this country and still ‘Where you’re from’? Every damn waiter wants to know my life story. And if I complain, people say, Oh, but Americans are curious…” The hardships of immigrant life are a worthy subject, though readers will hardly find anything new in these pages beyond the revelation that highly educated people often have to take menial jobs upon moving to the U.S.
Ambitious in its themes, this novel of the immigrant’s journey lacks focus and authority in the telling.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 347
Publisher: manuscript
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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