There was a sadness and dreariness to many of these stories that didn’t work so well for me. Phillips then explores the lives of different families in the area, both white and native, young and old, educated and working class. It begins in a compelling way. Two young girls are kidnapped when they stop to help a young man and are lured into his car. The town is devastated, and the police paper the town in flyers. It’s more of a collection of short character studies where the area itself is the common thread. And the Kamchatkan peninsula is certainly a fascinating setting – it’s remote and isolated, threatening and at the same time beautiful. Nor is it about the environment, as some in my book club expected. This book has been marketed as sort of a mystery/thriller, and if you’re expecting that, you’ll be disappointed. This is a book that feels a bit more like short stories, only the characters are all loosely connected to each other – a format I feel I’m seeing a lot of these days (Bernadine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other does this very well, and so does Elizabeth Strout). Phillips received a Fulbright fellowship to live there in 2011, and she wrote her story from the perspective of the white and native people who live there. Author Phillips is an American who decided to write about a very remote area in Siberia called Kamchatka. This is a debut novel that’s received quite a bit of praise, but it was not quite as good as I hoped it would be.
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