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Loading... Disappearing Earth: A novel (original 2019; edition 2019)by Julia Phillips (Author)
Work InformationDisappearing Earth by Julia Phillips (2019)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Setting the scene with a kidnapping of two young girls, this book has an ominous beginning and the suspense of the story grows as months pass and the story jumps to the perspective of many girls and women's stories across the Kamchatka peninsula. This story sucks you in from the start and then kind of leaves you questioning as it cycles through a variety of perspectives and stories that can on surface seem almost unrelated. When the kidnapper appears in the book it's obvious, even though it's not directly acknowledged, but it doesn't take away from the suspense of the story as that is driven through trying to connect how all these women's stories are interwoven and connected to this crime. This book accomplishes something rarely seen in crime dramas in taking the focus away from the perpetrator to the point of irrelevance and instead focusing on how it effects those left behind and the community. It also does an excellent job of portraying this heartbreaking story without ever being dark or descriptively traumatic, allowing the reader to fill it in for themselves or avoid it if that's too much for them. Really interesting tactic of writing for this type of story and I quite enjoyed it, easily recommended.
...the mystery (which turns out to have quite a few twists; it's worth reading until the very end) isn't everything, either. As Phillips has said in interviews, her book is a means of exploring the violence in women's lives, violence in many forms: The aforementioned widowing, which occurs when a man dies in a car accident on an icy road. Domestic violence in all its abusive forms. Abduction, rape, keeping secrets. As the many characters live through the calendar year, they appear in each others' stories, bit by bit. If you're paying attention, you may figure who took the girls. There will be those eager to designate “Disappearing Earth” a thriller by focusing on the whodunit rather than what the tragedy reveals about the women in and around it. And if there is a single misstep in Phillips’s nearly flawless novel, it arrives with the tidy ending that seems to serve the needs of a genre rather than those of this particularly brilliant novel. But a tidy ending does not diminish Phillips’s deep examination of loss and longing, and it is a testament to the novel’s power that knowing what happened to the sisters remains very much beside the point. The ending of “Disappearing Earth” ignites an immediate desire to reread the chapters leading up to it: incidents and characters that seemed trivial acquire new meanings. The novel’s title comes from a scary story that Alyona tells her sister in the very first chapter, about a village on a bluff overlooking the ocean which is suddenly washed away by a tsunami. This story will be retold by the novel’s close, just as the novel will retell itself. What appears to be a collection of fragments, the remains of assorted personal disasters and the detritus of a lost empire, is in truth capable of unity. For the heirs of all that wreckage, discovering that they have the ability to achieve this unity—that they have had it all along—is the one great act of detection required of them. Storytelling is a major thread here, with the telling of stories starting and ending the book, and appearing throughout. Disappearing Earth is closer to a traditional novel than Elizabeth Strout’s Anything is Possible or Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, but its use of storytelling functions in much the same way, each chapter a story unto itself, the stories layered on top of those that came before, the threads and themes accruing as the book builds. The book never utilizes a point-of-view more than once. One of the downsides of this type of novel, of course, is that in not returning to characters and their particular stories, the reader may feel dissatisfied. In later stories, we catch glimpses or hear whispers of what’s happened to earlier characters, but there is a suspension here, a feeling of loss. This structure, though, nicely speaks to the loss of the girls, and allows that sense of incompletion to underscore the possibility that there may not be an ending at all, much less one that is fulfilling. Storytelling is a major thread here, with the telling of stories starting and ending the book, and appearing throughout. Disappearing Earth is closer to a traditional novel than Elizabeth Strout’s Anything is Possible or Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, but its use of storytelling functions in much the same way, each chapter a story unto itself, the stories layered on top of those that came before, the threads and themes accruing as the book builds. The book never utilizes a point-of-view more than once. One of the downsides of this type of novel, of course, is that in not returning to characters and their particular stories, the reader may feel dissatisfied. In later stories, we catch glimpses or hear whispers of what’s happened to earlier characters, but there is a suspension here, a feeling of loss. This structure, though, nicely speaks to the loss of the girls, and allows that sense of incompletion to underscore the possibility that there may not be an ending at all, much less one that is fulfilling. AwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
The shattering disappearance of two young girls from Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula compounds the isolation and fears of a tight-woven community, connecting the lives of neighbors, witnesses, family members, and a detective throughout an ensuing year of tension. No library descriptions found.
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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Disappearing Earth is at its simplest, a story of missing girls. Young sisters Alyona and Sophia disappear without a trace one August afternoon. The city of Petropavlovsk and the surrounding communities are shaken by the incident, yet the police turn up no leads, and the case quickly goes cold. But the people most affected by the disappearance are the women of this isolated place, and it is they who become the focus of the story.
When I read the description of this book, about “the kidnapping of two small girls,” I thought I knew exactly what to expect from this book. Yet in truth, the girls themselves, and their mother, play a small part in the story – the focus is instead largely on women who are either tied to the case in some way, or who are emotionally affected by it.
Each chapter follows a different woman’s (or girl’s) perspective. Each of them is going through something different, yet each has had their daily lives affected by the disappearance. But as a reader, more is gained from each woman’s perspective than, “how they are affected” – it goes into themes of misogyny, dissatisfaction with life, and feelings of entrapment.
At times, some of the characters’ perspectives are extremely detached from the girls’ disappearance – in the sense they aren’t acquainted with it at all beyond news reports. Yet, all the perspectives tied together to further the plot, in ways that surprised me.
Despite how interesting it was to read a story told over so many different perspectives, I felt at times it was also the novel’s biggest weakness. Namely, there are just so many perspectives and characters, it was difficult to keep track of who’s who – especially when some of the characters reappeared in other chapters. Something that also bothered me, was that each chapter leaves its character’s story open-ended – you are left almost with a cliffhanger for every character’s situation. (This may be more of a personal-preference thing, however, because I generally prefer more closure in stories.)
This drama plays out over a setting that was unique and fascinating in and of itself – the remote Kamchatka Peninusula in Eastern Russia. This previously was an area I knew nothing about. Judging from her acknowledgements, the author has meticulously researched and studied first-hand what life is like in this remote and isolated area. I was particularly enlightened by the indigenous experience in this area, and the dichotomy that plays out between the novel’s indigenous and Russian peoples added a deeper layer to the story.
Overall, this was a haunting, suspenseful, and beautifully written novel that subverted the traditional kidnapping-mystery format. A solid, strong debut. This was a 4.5 star read for me, and I’d highly recommend it
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