Anyone who has ever lost a loved one will become a little teary when a quiet middle-aged nurse is widowed for the second time.īook Reviews 'Broken Ground' Balances Location, Character And Props In Perfect Proportion The situations remain strange in their specificities and universal in their familiarity anyone who has ever had a mother will recognize the false bright tones used with children when trying to conceal disharmony.
In winter, herding people come south to visit their families and tempers flare in close quarters. A couple on an autumn camping trip forget their tent, but it works out for the best. Young people grapple with sex and sexual identities in a late-season swim. The book advances month by month in the year after the sisters vanish, and each is tied firmly yet transparently to its season, like flat-sewn animal pelts.
Or does one reveal the other? Phillips spent two years there on a 2011 Fulbright grant, and lets her experience shimmer lightly, in details like the needlework on an indigenous character's dance costume, strong tea laced with whisky served in china cups, the particular "smoke, meat, mildew" funk of reindeer herding camps. While Alyona and Sophia Golosovskaya are not completely forgotten by their community, the chapters that follow reveal more about Kamchatka than they do the mystery of the girls' fate. In the first chapter, a disappearance does take place: Two young sisters are lured into a strange man's car after he tells them his leg is hurt and he needs help. Kamchatka, with its main city of Petropavlovsk, forms the backdrop to a stunning debut novel from Julia Phillips, Disappearing Earth. Rife with wildlife, volcanoes, and treacherous topography, it's also almost inaccessible, with no major roads connecting it to the rest of Russia - because it was a closed military zone until 1989. While the peninsular Russian province of Kamchatka is not exactly in Sarah Palin's sightline, its far, far Eastern and Northern coordinates make it more like Nome than Moscow. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Disappearing Earth Author Julia Phillips
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