Lucky breaks

Belorusets, a documentary photographer and activist, captures the extraordinary lives of ordinary Ukrainian women in her arresting fiction debut, a story collection. The brief entries survey lives upended by the political and military turmoil over the past two decades: "that's the kind of country we have, okay? The unprotected kind," recounts the eponymous narrator of the excellent "Lena in Danger," about a woman who leaves Ukraine for Germany in the 2000s. Some have a magical or fantastical element, such as "The Woman Who Caught Babies into a Mitt," in which a powerful witch places curses on whole buildings. As the war in the Donetsk region begins in 2014, many of the women disappear--in "The Florist," a woman spends all her time in her flower shop ("it was only inside her store," the narrator says of her, "that she knew how to exist"), until she and the shop disappear. In "A Woman at the Cosmetologist's," another woman finds comfort visiting her cosmetologist, who gives massages and fulfills the role of a therapist. As suicide rates increase, the characters' despair becomes palpable in a series of standout stories, namely "The Stars" and "The Crash." Two of Belorusets's photo series supplement her writing, but her words speak for themselves. The combination makes for a powerful exercise. (Mar.)

A debut collection depicting women who live on the margins of Ukrainian society. "I've never felt a sense of security in Ukraine," explains the narrator of one story. "It wasn't safe for a girl or woman there." Indeed, a sense of unease pervades every corner of this book, which spotlights women affected directly and indirectly by the violence in Eastern Ukraine. (The contours of the conflict are anything but straightforward: "Russia is waging war against Ukraine; Ukraine is waging war against an internal enemy…people say that Europe is also waging some kind of war here.") In a series of narrative portraits, readers are introduced to a witch who delivers a town's babies using an enormous mitt, years later wordlessly compelling them to do her bidding ("The Woman Who Caught Babies Into a Mitt"); to a woman who lives in a damp room, "bursting with health, so much so that she no longer felt human," and prays desperately for illness ("The Woman Who Fell Sick"); and, in the acerbically ironic "The Woman Who Could Not Walk," to a protagonist whose "perfidious feet" betray her and stop moving amid a crowded street on International Women's Day. Some stories adopt an overtly symbolic register, like the darkly humorous "The Stars," in which a weekly horoscope informs townspeople when it's safe to venture outside and when they should "seek seclusion and privacy" from the shellings above. Some are masterfully imbued with a sense of loss--such as "The Florist," in which a woman as beautiful as her flowers disappears without explanation, presumably "into the fields and joined the partisans." Though the stories' brevity occasionally dissatisfies, it also renders each one precious--like a gut punch, full of simple observations that quickly become devastating. Belorusets, who came to fiction from photojournalism (her own images appear in the book), excels at building stories that serve as striking snapshots of lives--strange, beautiful, and absent the interpretative context that might render them neater and less unsettling. As it is, this singular collection brings Ukraine, "the land of residual phenomena," entirely to life. Striking and original. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.