RIMA'S DREAMS

A young woman begins a modeling career to escape from her hometown in Zahr’s novel.

Rimahas been training to be a concert pianist ever since she received a piano for her 12th birthday. She loves making music, but her ultimate goal is to get out of her Russian hometown of Kursk and make a life for herself in the West. While vacationing on a cruise ship, she’s discovered by a modeling scout who’s taken with her beauty. Rima feels conflicted at first but eventually sees that modeling might be her ticket out of Russia. While temporarily living in Moscow before a modeling job, she meets an American named Alexander Loft, for whom she develops romantic feelings. As she becomes prominent in her field, she continues to think about what she really wants out of life. Zahr is a proficient writer, and her prose is often well crafted. However, the story that she tells isn’t particularly exciting. As a protagonist, Rima is a bit too perfect to be fully engaging: She’s a skilled musician who’s breathtakingly beautiful and becomes successful at modeling with relatively little effort. The overall plot has very low stakes aside from one questionable point of conflict that many readers will find offensive: Alexander has been intimate with a man in the past, and he’s seeing a therapist as a result, spurred by Rima’s assumption that he’s somehow confused about his sexual orientation. Alexander learns that he’s bisexual, but when he eventually gets a boyfriend, the story troublingly paints his bisexuality as a stop on the way to being gay—and also notes that he only managed to love Rima because she was “so perfect.”

A sometimes-problematic story that relies too heavily on its protagonist’s supposed flawlessness.