by Julia Phillips

This collection of loosely connected short stories was another Sierra Club book club pick. A novel, written as multiple independent stories, but happening in the same universe & with overlapping characters, was not a style I had encountered before, even though I think I was the only one at book club in that position 🙂.

But I liked it. A lot. I think that structure was the perfect fit for this book. All the stories in here are about women suffering from pain: some from physical pain, but most from emotional pain caused by dysfunctional relationships. The author did an artful job of making me feel empathetic and compassionate toward each story’s subject. But when a protagonist from a previous story shows up as a supporting character in another story, then the feeling of emotional awareness is compounded - I found myself awed by the web of emotion created by the author for all of these women’s pain. I wanted to shout at one character in conversation, “But she is feeling lonely, too! You need to open up and talk about your hidden pain!”

Next to this conveyance of the universality of suffering, a call for solidarity seems to be imbedded in the writing, although it’s not explicit. Solidarity of indigenous peoples living on land now occupied by a Russians (the story takes place in Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula) comes up several times. And a smaller, still, but still recurring theme is older characters reflecting on their sense of citizenry and patriotism both before and after the fall of the Soviet Union. While most of their comments ultimately draw towards conservatism and, usually, bigotry, for me that question around the nature of solidarity and means for building community in the modern era persisted.