Review by Booklist Review
Being a single mother is difficult enough, but Nadia Andreevna has it many orders of magnitude worse. The Brooklyn resident is trying to make ends meet through various jobs as a care provider, but she understandably can't distance herself from the war-torn Ukraine she had to flee from as a refugee. Worse, due to complications during the asylum process, Nadia had to leave her diabetic daughter, Larisska, back in the home country. Hanging on to a sliver of hope, Nadia longs for a way to accelerate her daughter's arrival in the U.S., but the wait is interminable, and during that separation, Larisska has grown into her own willful person. The story, switching between Brooklyn, Ukraine, and Russia, is ungainly and often veers into melodrama, leaving the characters with little room for growth. Yet Reyn (The Imperial Wife, 2016) delivers an elegiac look at the rootlessness that accompanies immigration while also tenderly capturing long-distance mothering and the challenges that all parents face when letting go engenders a terrible sense of powerlessness.--Poornima Apte Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In Reyn's excellent exploration of the immigrant experience, a Ukrainian transplant to the United States grapples with the convoluted legacy of her home country. Once head bookkeeper at an important gas pipe factory in east Ukraine, Nadia Andreevna now nannies for a family in Brooklyn, navigating an unfamiliar land of artisanal mayonnaise and American parenting. Nadia had fled the politically destabilized country in 2008, aiming to send for her daughter, Larissa - detained due to a bureaucratic loophole - immediately. But six years have passed, and she spends her days writing pleading letters to senators and obsessively tracking news reports that document mounting violence in her home region. As Nadia resorts to increasingly extreme measures to reunite with her daughter - including scouting American suitors for Larissa at nightclubs - the narrative periodically flips back to Nadia's raw, affecting life as a single mother in Ukraine, fighting to carve out an existence for herself and her daughter amid a rapidly changing country. When Larissa's immigration suddenly looms closer, Nadia must reckon with how her memories of Larissa - whom she has not seen for seven years - abut against reality, and learn to forge her way in a culture that poses frequent affronts to her identity. In beautiful and emotionally perceptive prose, Reyn (The Imperial Wife) probes the intimate ways cultures clash within individuals, forcing them to knit together disparate truths to make sense of the world, and provides a tender depiction of how mother-daughter bonds morph over time and space. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Six years ago, Nadia left her only daughter, Larisska, behind in war-torn Ukraine. Since then, she's tried to bring her daughter to America, but she fears the reunion may bring even more problems.Back in Ukraine, Nadia worked as a bookkeeper for a pipe manufacturing company, a job that not only helped her pay the bills, but also brought a dashing midlevel manager, the technolog, into her orbit. One afternoon of illicit pleasure on his desk leads to Nadia's pregnancy, but the technolog has no intention of leaving his wife and daughter, so Nadia becomes a single mother. From birth, Larisska was anything but easy, refusing her own mother's milk but accepting the neighbor's. As tensions increase among western Ukrainians, separatists, and Russians, life in Nadia's neighborhood begins disintegrating, and soon the pipe company is paying its employees in mandarin oranges, good for selling on the black market but not so good for diabetic Larisska. Once the technolog reveals that the company is closing, Nadia and Larisska's application to leave Ukraine becomes even more urgent, but when their names finally reach the top of the list, 21-year-old Larisska has aged out, and Nadia chooses to go to America alone.. Devastated by her mother's decision, Larisska rarely even Skypes or texts with Nadia. One night, however, Nadia's friends convince her to go clubbing, and she concocts a scheme to get Larisska a green carda scheme that will upturn Nadia's own life and perhaps bring a bit of romance into it. Reyn (The Imperial Wife, 2016) deftly spins a web of heartache and memory around Nadia's daily life. As she tries to handle the outrageous behavior of American toddlers and elderly Russian men with access to Viagra, her thoughts continually turn to her homeland.A compassionate portrait of a mother aching with regrets yet brave enough to fight for her family. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
