Haley Tanner

I read this book despite the fact that it appeared to center around a magician and his magic. I love to read about historical magicians, but I find most modern-day magic shows abhorrent - a prejudice of mine.

Yes, Vaclav and Lena is about a kid magician with a magic act, but it's also about his best friend, Lena, and their extended world of families and school and the larger Russian immigrant community in Brooklyn. I can't speak to the accuracy of the portrayal of these things, but it's show more fiction so I don't really care about that.

I loved this book. It's tender, magical, sweet. It's sad, brutal, and heartbreaking. It's characters are flawed and sometimes unlikeable, but when considered more deeply their flaws are easy to understand. I could put myself into every character's shoes and that's good writing.

A beautiful, but tragic story about love that may never be, all the obstacles there are to forming and keeping human connections, the big hard world that can grind you down, and the people who lift you up in their lives and around their dinner tables, providing continuity when you can't find it on your own. Excellent read. show less

Do you believe in soul mates? Not the kind glorified in romances but a deep down to the bone connection that goes beyond love to your very existence and without which you might as well forget how to breathe? Haley Tanner's touching and melancholy debut novel, Vaclav and Lena, captures this kind of intense and focused connection, one forged in childhood, enduring separation, and able to pick up again as if nothing (and everything) had changed.


Both Vaclav and Lena are just children when the show more novel opens, living in the heart of the Russian community in Brighton Beach. They are the closest of friends, two Russian-American children who attend the same ESL class at school and who are as inseparable as only two otherwise lonely children can be. Vaclav dreams of being a famous magician and having Lena be his lovely assistant and the two of them meet in Vaclav's apartment to practice their act and to be cared for by Vaclav's indomitable, doting, and overprotective Russian immigrant mother, Rasia. But underneath this sweet childhood friendship, there are much darker tones. Vaclav is an only child and much treasured but Lena is an orphan, unwanted and uncared for by her aunt who is a strip club dancer and prostitute. Little Lena is neglected and ignored and has learned to lie and steal and keep secrets, even, or perhaps especially, from those who would care for and protect her. When Rasia witnesses something she cannot ignore, Lena disappears overnight from Vaclav's life, leaving him bereft and yearning for her. Always in his thoughts, he superstitiously still wishes her a good night every night, for the entire seven years she is gone from his life, from the age of ten to seventeen.


The years of being apart change both Vaclav and Lena as they grow and mature separately. And the narrative follows them through this time of absence, fleshing out not only what goes on in their respective lives in the intervening years but also filling in Lena's babyhood and the early experiences that shaped her into the little girl who was for the child Vaclav as necessary as breathing. And then the narrative moves on again and focuses on the teenaged Vaclav and Lena, their rediscovery of each other, and the endurance of their connection as they come together once again. And it at this point that Vaclav, ever mindful of his love's fragility, spins some real and tender magic in Lena's new and much changed life.


The novel is a triptych with its three distinct phases in the relationship of our eponymous characters. And impressively, the narrative voice changes in each of the three sections. In the first, much of the dialogue is written just as Russian immigrants to this country would construct sentences given Russian grammar. In the second, there is a coming of age, a maturing voice as both Vaclav and Lena assimilate into American culture in ways that Vaclav's parents have been unable to do fully. And in the third, they are both typical teenagers and yet so very different because of their awareness of who they are and how they fit together. Some of the portrayals of Russian immigrants and culture is cliched but the poignancy of immigrants trying to achieve the American dream through their children (in this case specifically through Vaclav) balances these moments out. And while this tale of soul mates and an abiding love might sound lighthearted, the novel tackles some incredibly dark and terrible topics: abuse, neglect, and abandonment among them. Vaclav and Lena are generally well drawn and while they are precocious beyond their years in the beginning, they end by coming across as much more age appropriate. The ending itself was unexpected but completely in character given how thoughtful and protective Vaclav was from the age of five onward. Tanner has crafted an ultimately engaging novel here. show less

On the surface, Vaclav & Lena is a charming story about friendship and love. Underneath the surface, there is a much darker story about truth and the lengths one is willing to go to protect a loved one from it. The truth is never what one expects, and in this debut novel of Haley Tanner, when the truth is finally uncovered, it has the potential to tear apart relationships of all sorts.

One of the most appealing aspects of the novel is the voice of the narrator. As the narrator switches point show more of view from Vaclav to Lena to Vaclav’s mom, the narration takes on the individual idiosyncrasies of the English language depending on each character’s fluency with English. In the beginning, everyone is still becoming familiar with English, and the narration takes on a sing-song hesitancy to it that is very authentic to a non-native speaker. As Vaclav and Lena become more fluent in their adopted country, the narration becomes more fluent as well. Each point of view creates a clear voice for the respective character, which helps make each character more three-dimensional and fully developed than just the dialogue alone.

Vaclav, as a young boy with big dreams, is a fascinating character. In spite of everything to which he is exposed, he remains refreshing innocent and full of potential. It is not until quite late in the story where the reader understands just how unusual this naivety is given his close relationship with Lena. Even his fascination with magic and his dreams of being a magician are quaint. However, this, in no way, makes Vaclav & Lena unrealistic. Rather, it adds an air of old-fashioned charm to the overall story, one in which anything is possible.

However, Ms. Tanner tempers the dreams with a cold dash of reality and tragedy in Lena. Her mysterious past and troubled childhood are the perfect foil for Vaclav’s more idyllic childhood. Lena and Vaclav are opposites in almost every manner possible, and their relationship is all the more believable in spite of, or even because of their willingness to overlook these opposite tendencies.

Ms. Tanner is going to be an author to watch. In Vaclav & Lena, she has created an old-fashioned friendship novel that transcends time and finds its core in the relationships of the story. Vaclav & Lena has a timeless quality to it that renders it difficult to pinpoint to any one decade. While it does take place in the twenty-first century, the reader can easily picture the story taking place 100 years earlier. The heart of the story does not depend on the setting, and the story is stronger for it.

Thank you to Erika Greber from Random House for my advanced copy! show less

This is a beautiful and bittersweet novel that starts as a sweet story of friendship before it takes some very dark turns- and that friendship is tested over and over. I ended up loving it but just be warned that it goes to some pretty disturbing places. Vaclav and Lena are refugees in different ways from the fall of Communism and the Soviet Union. They don't always understand what's going on around them, why the adults in their lives do what they do, and they grow apart then together again.