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Loading... Russian winter : a novel (original 2010; edition 2010)by Daphne Kalotay
Work InformationRussian Winter by Daphne Kalotay (2010)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Family Drama I picked this book up at our local big used book sale, rather randomly, and finally decided to pick it up. I had not heard of this book (pub 2010), though undoubtedly did a quick GR search before buying the hardback. But this was much more than I expected. There are two main storylines--the past, in 1950s USSR, with the Bolshoi ballet, several of the dancers, and their boyfriends/husbands/mothers. Then we have present-day Boston, when one of those dancers, Nina, elderly and wheelchair bound, decides to auction her jewelry collection to raise funds for a local ballet initiative. Then, a matching piece is donated anonymously. We know who it is, and so does she. We meet Grigori, adopted in Russia and a child, now a professor of languages at a local university. Drew, in charge of research of the pieces for the auction house. Their associates. And Nina's associates in the 1950s. These storylines fit together very well, but the links and connections all work. Nothing is too close, nor too far-fetched. This is also as close to romance as I ever get, and it was well done. I really did enjoy this book, even tho I read the 400 plus pages in small doses. Particularly when I began the book, I had to get accustomed to the back and forth flow of the story and characters. The storyline revolves around the post WW2 life of a ballerina, Nina-her family and friends, and flows between her early life in Russia and her present life in the USA. A wide cast of characters is involved, once you get everyone in place the book does become a faster read. This was a book about... absolutely nothing. I read half this book and could not find a discernible plot. It was comprised of a series of vignettes from the lives of three people. I have a fifty-page rule- if it's not good after fifty pages, I put it down. But I kept reading this one because I thought there would be a payoff and the random scenes would come together. Half-way through it still hadn't happened and I really didn't care enough about the characters to slog on to the end to see if there was some point to it all. Definitely not a keeper.
Despite its engaging suspense, pristine character development, and jolting plot twists, the novel’s sentences can feel rambling and comma-heavy. Certain passages burst with unnecessary asides and needless details, which at times can bog down this otherwise gripping conflict. Other times, some characters’ behavior is so melodramatic as to make them seem cartoonish. These hammy expressions are distracting, as if to force readers to feel for these characters when, in actuality, such empathy comes naturally to a writer like Kalotay. The length of the novel also makes for a small but noteworthy letdown—the climax is spectacular but disproportionate to a 459-page story. It comes slowly, meticulously, and fantastically—but then it quickly goes, with a resolution that also feels too short. Still, Russian Winter is a fantastic first novel. The drama of Soviet oppression isn’t laid on too thick, and the hidebound world of the Bolshoi ballet, though pertinent to Nina’s life, doesn’t suffocate the story. Instead, human emotions breathe human qualities into this novel: passion, pain, love, jealousy, insolence, regret, loneliness, loss.
Former Bolshoi ballerina Nina Revskaya auctions off her jewelry collection and becomes overwhelmed by memories of her homeland, the friends she left behind amidst Stalinist aggression, and the dark secret that brought her to a new life in Boston. 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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