Member Review

I could go 3.5 stars.

I thought, for some reason, this would be a short book. It's chapters feel like short *stories*, but the book ended up feeling longer than the page-count would have you believe. I also spent a lot of time not knowing what was going on-- there are _a lot_ of characters and it was difficult to keep some of them straight. Each chapter focuses on one character, and the timelines overlap-- there may have been some tighter editing needed here, as I was convinced for a while there was a time-travel thing happening, but now I'd say there was not time travel, only that the sequences of events were not at all clear. I haven't read any Russian literature that I can think of, so maybe some of the things I found confusing are standard to the literature/culture?

The short stories are all over the place, from fairly cute and tame to pretty strong horror-- they don't average out and this should be suggested only to readers onboard with horror; world literature readers or anyone interested in trying translated books might find this interesting, with that caveat.

eARC from NetGalley.