WINTERLAND

Meadows’ absorbing fifth novel follows a promising young Soviet gymnast as she enters a ruthless sports system that emphasizes winning at all costs.

It is 1973 in the remote Arctic mining town of Norilsk, where 8-year-old Anya lives with her father, Yuri, who's employed at the local metalworks. Katerina, Anya’s mother, disappeared three years ago, and it was speculated at the time that the former Bolshoi ballerina might have returned to Moscow or even defected. Despite the shadow cast by her mother’s disappearance and her father’s own loss of status within the Communist Party, Anya’s gymnastic potential has deemed her “an asset to the Soviet Union.” When she is selected to train with Anatoly Popov, Anya embarks on a physical and emotional journey that takes her from a run-down gym in Norilsk to the famed national gymnastics training center at Round Lake in preparation for the 1980 Moscow Olympics. In an alternating storyline, Vera, Anya’s elderly neighbor and confidante, recalls her privileged pre-revolutionary childhood and her years in a Siberian labor camp that also killed her husband and son. Writing with a confidence based on excellent research, Meadows vividly depicts the Soviet training system—and its abuses—without taxing readers with too many technical terms. Some of the era’s greatest stars (Ludmilla Tourischeva, Nellie Kim, Olga Korbut) make brief appearances, representing a competitive gymnastics that is transitioning from traditional balletic artistry to a more athletic—and riskier—style. If there's a flaw in this smoothly paced novel, it's the lack of conflict motivating its characters to action. Although well drawn, they are passive figures living in a society that allows for no individual agency. Also, the book’s final section covering the collapse of the Soviet Union feels rushed.

An enlightening portrait of a now-vanished world.