2.5 stars. This is historical fiction and a sort of coming-of-age novel. It is set in Russia in the 1980s and focuses on two close friends, who are almost like sisters, and eventually the two boys they meet, and the four of them have a close bond. This book has gotten rave reviews, so I may be an outlier on this one, but it just did not work for me. I found it hard to get into, and I really could not relate to the characters because they just were not that likable to me. This novel did, though, give me a decent glimpse of life in Russia as the Soviet Union began to disintegrate, and for that I applaud the author.

I wasn't sure what to expect with this book but ended up enjoying it quite a bit and learning a lot. Admittedly, I've struggled with literary fiction this past year, finding it hard to get myself to focus on books that require more attention. But this one did a good job of grabbing me and holding my interest, which is a feat. However, it did drag on at parts, making it a book I wasn't always jumping to pick up. But overall it was a worthwhile read, one that gave me insight into a country and time I didn't know a whole lot about.

I truly adored this. The blurb mentions that Anya and Milka are "coming of age in the Soviet Union," but I wouldn't specifically classify this as a quote-unquote coming of age novel. It's much more a slice-of-life introspective centering Anya. But you can't have Anya without Milka; they're inseparable. The entire narrative, with the twists and tragedies and heartwarming moments, are all built around Anya reflecting on memory, nationalism (though this isn't quite the right word as she isn't a nationalist), how life is shaped by grief and trauma, love and family. All wrapped up with several references to Viktor Tsoi <3. Also absolutely read the author's note if you can. Seeing how much of this was influenced by events in the author's own life was fascinating. I think that's part of the reason why this worked so well as a reflection on who and how we remember and how that impacts the way we live in the world around us.

A beautifully written, thoughtful rumination on what can happen when life-changing events occur on both micro and macro levels during the most formative years of one's life.

In this riveting and heart-wrenching novel about two young women growing up in the Soviet Union, we find every element of the traditional Russian novel turned to new purposes and deftly created amid the turmoil of the 1970s and 1980s. There is a ferocity in Gorcheva-Newberry's language that drives the book even as it lingers on details and relaxed, timeless moments. For anyone who has read books about the USSR from thrillers or non-fiction, this novel will broaden their concept of this period, and how everyday life was lived.

At first, by description I was excited to read a historical fiction story that was set in Russia during the 1980’s. I really tried hard to like this book as I love reading about Russian history, but finally decided to abandon a book. Something I rarely do. The obsessive exploration of young teens fixation on sex and the vulgarity of the language just put me off. I’m not a prude but I feel that this inclusion of language did not move the story forward nor was it necessary. Perhaps others would say that it reflects the teens’ angst of growing up in an oppressive society.

This is a story of the coming of age of two girls, alike in so many ways and like sisters, and yet they were from two vastly different home lives. Hope is a concept repeatedly mentioned as the only thing tangible that they have. The later befriend two boys and the four become very close as they continue to explore they sexuality and coming of age. At a quarter of the way through, having no enjoyment from this book, I have stopped. Again, very rare for me. The story drags on, there was no beauty in the language, the characters are very flawed and as a reader I didn’t care about them (except for the grandmother). Perhaps I will attempt this again, but who knows? I apologize at the abbreviated review.

Thank you to #netgalley for the opportunity to read and review this book.

Two teens in Russia in the 80s. They are best friends, Anya and Milka. Anya is calm and level headed where Milka is reckless and in desperate need of love. This book is a rich coming of age story full of friendship, lies, love and deceit. There is a political backdrop to this story, which ends up with one of the girls leaving Russia as an exchange student and then marries an American. Enjoy

I am definitely in the minority with this review. I am about half way through the book and I am having trouble finishing it; although I am going to keep at it to see if the second half gets more interesting. The pace of the book is a bit slow for my liking yet I appreciate the history and culture depicted. It might be I was just in the mood for something else at this moment; so onward and I will return to finish the book in a couple of weeks. If finishing changes my impression I will update this review!

Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with an early release in exchange for a fair and honest review.

I want to thank NetGalley for the ARC. The Orchard is about 4 youth growing up in the 1980’s in the last days of the Soviet Union. The first half is a coming of age story from the viewpoint of Anya. The second part is about Anya living in the USA. She got married but her parents are still in Russia. Her friend’s former boyfriend is involved with a group trying to buy her parents’ dacha and apple orchard. Her parents are reluctant to sell it but they are under a lot of pressure. Anya goes back to Russia to see her parents and deal with the issue and her past. I enjoyed the book a lot. The author does a great job of describing life in the Soviet Union during the 1980’s and the changes that were taking place in the country.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for allowing me to read this amazing book. The Orchard is a heartbreaking glimpse into Soviet life in the 80s. The story of Anya and Milka is both beautiful and painful. They are as close as sisters. Their lives are hopeful yet cruel. This is a beautifully told story of how our family, both the ones that take us in and the one that we are born in to, can shape us forever.

A magnificent story about the desperate times of Generation Perestroika.

Two teenagers in 1980s Russia share a cigarette. The reckless one, Milka, has just jumped from a high flying swing but sustains only a minor cut, saying from her seated position in the snow, “Wouldn’t that be cool to die on the same day as our Communist Leader?” The cautious one, Anya, tells her she’s nuts, that “Death is nothingness.” These two attitudes accompany the friends throughout the story. Milka is a dreamer of far away and exotic places. Anya is too practical for that, and her friend’s dreams only invoke her insecurities. Anya’s family has a modest dacha in the countryside, on which is an apple orchard. Milka’s mother has nothing but an incorrigible second husband, but Milka accompanies Anya to the dacha as if she is Anya’s sister. The apple orchard is a bit of a nod to Chekov’s cherry orchard, but it’s a loose connection. Gorcheva-Newberry’s apple orchard doesn’t so much represent materialism as Chekhov’s did. It is instead a symbol of the fragility of life during Russia’s transformation between Stalin and Gorbachev.

Like many Russian novels, The Orchard is rich with imagery. After an argument between Milka and her mother, Anya observes Milka’s face: “Winter lived there, with its ferocious winds and dead ossified earth and hard frozen snow.” Gorcheva-Newberry brilliantly weaves these images into the personalities of the novel’s characters. As seasons change, so do the characters, who often interact with each other with as much drama as a storm accompanying a passing cold front. In the end, a reader cannot know one character without the other three. Anya may be the narrator of the story, but the story is nothing without the others. It is reminiscent of Dostoevsky.
Can The Orchard be categorized as a coming-of-age novel? There are many elements that suggest it can be. At one point Milka states that she doesn’t want to grow up, “Because then you can’t blame anyone else for the shit that’s happening. It’s your own responsibility.” The cynicism appearing in many of Milka’s observations is also expressed by the girls’ two boyfriends, Lopatin and Trifonov. The author cleverly uses the personalities of the four characters to make pictures of angst and happiness, defeatism and hopefulness, and, finally, at the end of the novel, long after two of them have come of age, a mournful loss of resilience. Of course, there is a political backdrop to the story, much as there was in 1960s America for stories about those years. In Russia the times were much more sinister, where “We knew we had a fate, a destiny, designated by the Communist Party, and it was as irrevocable as the stars or the moon, as life itself.” There was some optimism, nevertheless, for a new Generation Perestroika when Anya and her friends were seventeen. But the optimism is fleeting for three of them.

Part Two of the novel begins in 1988, not in Russia but in America, where Anya marries while she is a foreign exchange student. Decades pass without her returning to Russia, and the reader sees her cautious personality bloom in her marriage. She says about her husband, “We rarely argued or disagreed or had long passionate conversations, and sometimes I thought of us as two pet fish in our aquarium, navigating through tall wavering weeds or hibernating inside a plastic castle, or hiding under a rock, ostracized by the glass.” But like so many Russian novels, trouble creeps into Anya’s life when she learns that a developer in Russia is badgering her parents to sell the dacha and its apple orchard. She must make a trip home. The weather imagery returns in a fashion similar to that used in Russia during Part One of the book. While driving her to the airport, her husband’s “face was a fall day—eyes clouded with thoughts, lips curled, folded at the corners like dry leaves.” Clearly, Anya’s life in America hasn’t been as harsh as it was in her coming of age years. Does the toned down imagery mean that the reader can expect a more optimistic end to Anya’s story than the endings in Dostoevsky, Bulgakov, or Chekhov? That’s for the reader to decide. For Anya’s family and friends, who’d not gone to America, the bleakness remains. Anya looks at her mother and notes that the “joy had been washed from her eyes; they were no longer blue but a dark, morose gray.”

Anya looks for closure during her visit to Russia, going to Milka’s house to confront her stepfather and visiting old places. The imagery returns to that of her teenage years, “a sunless frostbitten dawn, the air so white, as though sewn from snowflakes.” Worse, there was no snow, “the landscape grim, barren. It seemed as though nature wasn’t hibernating but dying.” And, of course, Lopatin shows up as the developer who wants the dacha and the orchard. He describes himself as an “old Russian with new money,” as well as bad news, of course. Anya and Lopatin go to the dacha, where they drunkenly try to make sense of life and then, with a nod to Chekov, chop down an apple tree, after which there is an orgy of self-reconciliation of a sort involving a chainsaw, a visit to cemeteries, a reckoning for Milka’s stepfather, and, sometime later, the planting of apple trees in Virginia. The timing of the action as well as the prose associated with all of these events is well done.

It is difficult to make sense of the ending of The Orchard, except perhaps by a tortured interpretation that the novel’s character’s lives served a purpose. But that wouldn’t be in line with Russian fatalism, certainly, and it would be out of line with the novel’s predominant imagery, which suggests that life “is just weather, wind and rain, spurts of blinding snow.” If there is closure in the novel, it occurs for Anya in Virginia, not in Russia. Gorcheva-Newberry’s novel is a tour de force regarding the indelible marks written on young lives during desperate social and political times. And it is hard to say that the novel’s characters ever come of age. There is no profound passage into adulthood, only a capitulation to the reality that nothing better is on the horizon.

Mark Zvonkovic, Reviewer and Author

Four teenagers, Anya, Milka, Trifonov and Lopatin grow inseparable in the last days of the Soviet Union—but not all of them will live to see the new world arrive in this powerful debut novel. Coming of age is always difficult but living in the USSR in the 1980s presents a different youth than I remember. Best friends, these four—the family girl, the abused daughter, the philosopher, and the player find joy in the moment in an apple orchard, dancing to Queen music! But the collapse of the Soviet Union changes their lives as teens just as it changed the country. This book opened my eyes to history in a new way, by describing friendships that change based on family, government, and intimate events. The orchard itself becomes a character of escape, peace, grief, and change.

We come to the stark realization that memory does not fade or disappear; rather, it moves us across time, connecting our past to our future, joys to sorrows. This powerful novel speaks to how we experience and process grief—for a beloved friend, a cherished ideal for a country, or for youth itself.

I loved this book—it was thoughtful, full of emotions and helped me understand the Soviet culture. I labeled it as a historical novel but I think it’s perhaps a book of our times.

Thank you- Ballantine Books, NetGalley and the author of this beautiful novel, Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry for this ARC.

The Soviet Union in the 1980’s was a foreign topic for me before reading this poignant novel that depicts life turning this decade until the 2010’s. The story follows Anya and Milka as they navigate their teenage years during life behind the Iron Curtain while trying to capture a real teenage adolescence through the music of Freddy Mercury and anything that gave them an outlet to a life beyond the IC.

Along with Milka and Anya, the story follows Anya’s parents and Grandmother as they also try to hold onto living in a desolate Soviet Era where Oligarchs controlled and owned most of the nation’s wealth while the Soviet people were left with very little. The family’s dacha is a symbol of pride for the family and when an old family friend comes to tell them they need to sell or else the family comes to a turning point of how to approach the new Russia.

The story is phenomenal and I would highly recommend, ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️✨

Thank you so much Random House/Ballantine Books for this joyous advanced ebook!.

The Orchard was such a fabulous story! At first I'm not going to lie I couldn't get into this story at first.
But I'm so glad I didn't put it down! It was such a refreshing book!
Kristina done an outstanding job here! To read more about Russian Lit was simply amazing and very intriguing.
The characters were very well created and developed. Four teenagers living during the Soviet Union!
She delivers a story with characters you care about!
A coming of age in the USSR in the 1980s we get a chance to see them change during these times!
This book is heartbreaking and emotional. Its one that I will recommend to anyone!

Thanks again NetGalley, Publisher and Author for the chance to read and review this amazing book!
I'll post to my Social media platforms closer to pub date!

This is a loose retelling of The Cherry Orchard and if you’re a fan of that play, then you’ll surely be a fan of this book. Written in a stark, distinctive voice that calls upon the Russian greats, The Orchard is a fascinating and somewhat uncomfortable read. It was looking into a window, to into the Soviet Union, and it did a great job of explaining and describing the setting and struggles of the time.

This novel is jewel-like, with many facets and many layers. Modern Russian history and its personal stories of loss and endurance are told in this beautiful-written piece. This writing will last throughout the test of time!

This book is a sometimes joyous, sometimes sad evocation of the Russian soul. The Orchard is cleverly evoked throughout the novel. "His hands were running through my hair, and it reminded me of the wind brushing through apple branches, through new tender leaves." The clear, visual descriptions take us to the Russian countryside and we learn how the Russians lived in the eighties while also learning how history pervades every family and their stories. The characters are strong and well-depicted. Within a few pages the reader starts to know and understand the characters and their family dynamics. Characters are drawn with sympathy and consideration.
The relationship between Russians and their Motherland are telling and show us how proud they are of their country while not fully understanding their complicated relationship with their own history.
This is a wonderful book for lovers of Russian literature, culture and history. The chaos of the eighties and its effect on most ordinary citizens is shown well through a small group of teenage friends.

I liked the idea of the book and the setting. It was interesting to read about Russia and their ideas. I thought the dialog between the boys and the girls and some of their shenanigans dragged on a bit and was more juvenile than I care to read. Otherwise, I liked the story fine. It was something different and I learned some interesting things about growing up in Russia. Ultimately, though, I would not recommend this book to friends.

The Orchard is primarily a coming-of-age novel about four teenagers living in the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s, listening to Queen and dreaming of running away to Paris and Rome while their parents argue about the state of the country, their unstable government, and politics in general.

The book is narrated by a teenage girl, Anya, and starts out with just her and her best friend Milka, spending most of their time either at Anya’s family’s apartment in the city or their dacha on an apple orchard. During their junior year of high-school though, Milka invites Lopatin and Trifonov over and the four of them quickly become inseparable, spending their time both in and out of school together. The first part of the book focuses on their last two years of high-school, before jumping forward 20 years to Anya living in America, where she moved after high school to complete her Ph.D.

I had some trouble getting into The Orchard at the beginning, and kept putting it down to read other books. But something made me keep picking it back up, and I’m so glad I did because I ended up loving this book! I will say that the book may need trigger warnings for references to childhood sexual assault and depictions of traumatic abortion/miscarriage. This book was heartbreaking, and I’m not sure I’d call it a typical coming-of-age novel because I likely wouldn’t recommend it to teens (not because I think they couldn’t handle it - I likely would’ve loved this book in high school and it’s not as though heartbreak is kept out of YA in general, but the book wasn’t written in a YA style and definitely seems written more for adult readers).

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

The Orchard is being published March 22, 2022. Thank you so much to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for the advance copy of this book!

This book was amazing. I felt like I knew a lot about communism and Russia, but this book completely changed my perspective. I saw both sides of the coin, the ones that feared change and preferred communism and those who wanted a different life and freedom. Wonderfully written and captivating.

I grew up during the Cold War, taught to fear and despise the evil Soviet empire, where no one was free and whose main goal in life was to obliterate the United States of America with a nuclear attack. We had drills in my elementary school for that imminent moment when the bomb dropped, on our knees, heads to the floor and hands over our little heads, as if that would prevent us all from immolation. I knew the shelves in Soviet stores were barren, the women all dressed like peasants, and the protestors were either sent to Siberia or outright killed.

What I did not know about was how the children in the Soviet Union lived, what they were taught about the United States (though I did know we were their enemy, too), and what they did for fun. Was there fun in the Soviet Union? The Orchard introduces us to a few of those children who, it turns out, had adolescent crushes, favorite singers, and parents who just didn’t understand them…just like us.
Narrated by Anya, The Orchard gives us a glimpse into the waning years of the Soviet Union as it begins to crumble around the true believers and the skeptics…Anya’s father the former and her mother the latter, who are in constant battle over the socialist ideals of the Bolsheviks. What the children were taught is best summed up by the principal of their school, lecturing them after the defection of the parents of one of the students. “As future Communist leaders…you must always choose community over self. Responsibility over desire. Sacrifice over gain. What the Ruchnik family did is shameful and irresponsible. You must always remember that your decisions don’t just impact you, but generations…Only together can we overcome personal difficulties and capitalist aggression and not be turned into slaves. That’s what they do to people in America, turn them into slaves.”

Heavy stuff for a 14-year-old who dreams of getting out of Russia and seeing other parts of the world, including the hated America, whose most treasured item is a bootleg tape of Freddie Mercury singing We Are the Champions. She and her best friend Milka are joined at the hip, living their lives together as nearly all early teen girls do. They bring Lopatin and Trifonov into their circle who are “as different as earth and sky”, one interested mostly in vodka and girls, the other in poetry and literature.

The Orchard has been compared to Anton Chekhov’s last work, The Cherry Orchard, and there is indeed a cherry orchard featured in this captivating novel. But one does not need to be familiar with the Chekhov work to be drawn in by this coming of age, sometimes tragic, tale. Gorcheva-Newberry grew up in Moscow and had a brilliant, rowdy, feisty friend who practically lived at her house. One day she and her family disappeared, never to be heard from again. Tormented by the loss, the author made up a story to preserve the memory of her friend. The Orchard is the outgrowth of that story and is a beautifully written, compelling testament to the power of friendship, no matter where it is.

Thank you to Ballantine Books and NetGalley for the eARC.