This is work of multi generational historical fiction. It starts in the United States during the 1930s, in the depths of Depression. Florence is a starry eyed idealist who believes that the Soviet Union is a socialist utopia, while the US is a country of decadent capitalism. She emigrates to the USSR in 1934. She is soon disappointed, but pride prevents her from going back to the US. She believes that she can make the world better by staying in the USSR.
She is forced to become an informer by the NKVD(Soviet secret police). This story moves back and forth between her son, Yulik/Julian, herself and her grandson, Lenny. The story moves between 1930s USSR and present day Russia.
Some characters who interact with them:
Henry Robbins, a US Air Force pilot in the same labor camp as Florence
Sidney, Florence's brother
Essie, a friend of Florence from the ship journey to the USSR in 1934
Timur Kachak, commander of 150 labor camps in Perm, Siberia

Some quotes:
Release of thousands of USSR political prisoners--"Entire forests of people felled, bound and plied and now cast adrift into the rising water."
Yulik, talking about his time in orphanages--"Whenever I tell anyone that I spent ages six to thirteen, inside of public orphanages, they tend to arrange their face in a reaction I call the Purple Heart Ceremony."
The process of arresting and convicting political prisoners--"The prison cells were only the first stage of an operation whose ultimate aim was the harvesting and replenishment of slave labor."

There is sadness and a measure of redemption in this book. It is quite long, but reads well, once you are about 50 pages in. I read it in seven days. I recommend it to historical fiction fans.
I give 4 out 5 stars. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me this book.

Great read! I loved how the story line went back and forth from present day back to the past. Very telling about early communism and struggles of that era. Found it hard to put the book down and couldnt wait until I was able to pick it up again.

Unfortunately, I could not finish this book. About 15% in I just was not interested in the plot or any of the characters.

The Patriots is a sweeping saga of Russian history from 1933 to the present. It’s a story of corruption, fear, misery and cruelty. It’s a love story of sacrifice and enduring fealty amidst a world intent on destroying itself.

This deeply researched saga tells of the struggles ordinary people face while trying to live ordinary lives in extraordinary circumstances. Faced with decisions that affect life, danger, imprisonment or even death they try to understand the people in control and carefully weigh what is safe and what is deadly.

Ms Krasikov weaves a tale of morality, love and devotion over three generations where corruption and self-preservation turn on the unexpected, unintended, unexplained or careless decisions of those in charge. How the ordinary person survives is often beyond their capacity to change. The only thing they have is hope.

Grab this one and be prepared for a weekend of reading!!

This was a good story with good characters. I think that it could have been completed in fewer pages.

Available now: The Patriots by Sana Krasikov

****4/5 stars-loved it

A multi-generational Russian-American-expat saga told in three parts, from pre- soviet Russia to post.

Recommended readers:

If you are a fan of historical fiction,
and a devotee of the bleak Russian novel, this one is for you.

Here's my Rankings:
4/5 for characters
4/5 for plot
4/5 overall
REVIEW FROM BOOKS FOR HER:

At the heart of the debut novel The Patriots is the character of Florence Fein, an idealist in depression era- America who departs Brooklyn for a new life in Russia. The story then alternates from her own story to that of her son and grandson, both affected very deeply by her youthful decision and the lessons of history. All three live part of their lives in the U.S. and part in Russia, each lending their own voices to twentieth- century history and rendering a clearly meticulously-researched and sweeping chronicle. Be prepared to be sucked into another world, on a journey long, weighty and somber. But then, if anyone has a recommendation of Russian fiction that tends away from the bleak, I’d love to hear about it.


The Patriots is available now

I expected so much more from this novel. It just was not my type of novel. It was well-written but just not for me.

I received a copy from NetGalley. I had a rough time getting through this book. I would start to enjoy the story from Florence's point of view when it would switch to her grandson. I had no sympathy for this spoiled idiot. It totally ruined the book for me. Russian history is something I've always had a hard time understanding and even while reading this historical fiction I was still confused. Maybe because it was just utter chaos. I don't know, but I did not enjoy this depiction. I said it was "OK" because it did have it's moments especially at the end. I definitely would not set down what you are reading to snatch this one up.

Sweeping, epic of love and family. Already recommended to my mother and grandmother as well as several friends for their book clubs.

Historical Fiction. My favorite book genre of all time. Once I started this book, I couldn't put it down. The author does a splendid job setting scenes, I felt like I was there in the story watching it unfold before my eyes. The characters are well developed, complex and believable.

This story switches back and forth between modern day Russia and the Soviet Union of the 1930s and 1950s. It is an impressive, fearful look at day to day lives of Russians living under the reign of both Stalin and Putin.

There were times in the story that I felt dragged on a bit much. I think the author could have gotten the point across with fewer words. There were instates that certain parts of the story seemed repetitive or just not relevant to the overall plot. I found myself skimming over entire pages.

I felt Krasikov did an amazing job showing the both the immediate and long term aftermath that a single decision can make. It is amazing to be able to look at a family and see the different mind sets between generations based on the society a person grows up in and how they are raised.

This was a 4 star read for me! I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

Thanks to Netgalley and Random House Publishing Group for allowing me to read and give my honest review.

This book is available now. Buy it, you will not be disappointed!

Happy Reading!

“The Patriots” by Sana Krasiko

ARC books are given before publication to professional reviewers for free in exchange for an honest review. I missed the publication deadline on “The Patriots,” and did not remember I owned the book until I saw a review of it in the NYT (which I did not read for fear of influencing my own review). I do hope my review, being written after publication, will still assist with this book’s sales for this is historical fiction at its finest. The story revolved around a Jewish girl, from Brooklyn who lived in Russia from 1933 to 1979. The author, Sana Krasiko, moved between voices and decades. The story is linear except for the prologue, which takes place in the 1950s. Then the story of the mother, which is told chronologically and in the third person, begins. However, her story was punctuated by the first-person voice of her 60-year old son, who narrates in the year 2008. I enjoyed this writing style, it kept the prose fresh while showing the different views of the times. Both mother and son lived in Russia for parts of their lives. In the 1930s, when most were immigrating to the US, our heroine was leaving New York for the Old World. She remained trapped there under Lenin and Stalin’s rule. She was sent to a prison camp. The son was forced to live in orphanages until his mother was released in the 1950s. But before all this happened, she was romanticizing the possibilities of creating a better life in Russia. Looking at today’s 2017 news, this book could hardly feel more relevant to this reviewer. I shyly admit that I did not know that Putin was a KBG officer in 2008.
In this novel, our Russian bound teen originally wanted to go to an elite American Women’s College. However, the family finances stood in the way, as her father's business suffered from the depression. She entered the co-ed world of NYC’s free public college education. It was here that she discovered other Jewish students arguing Marxism-Leninism and Communism vs. Capitalism. Her desire for pearls was replaced with a passion for political activism favoring socialized states. Think Barbara Streisand in “The Way We Were.” She graduated, and in her first job met and fell in love with a Russian man who was in the US for only a few months. To the horror of her family, she booked passage on a steamliner to Russia. She told her family that she was off to pursue her dream job and that she would be gone for one year, maybe two. In reality, she was really going to meet up with her Russian lover. Once she arrived and finally located her man, he rejected her. It appears that he was worldlier than she was, informing her to go home for she was in way over her head and that the USSR does not at all resemble a US college campus. Her pride would not let her return home. Besides, “Purges and politics aside, there was plenty of fun to be had in Moscow in 1934.” (One of the nice things about reviewing after publication is that I now can use quotes, unlike pre-publication.)
Eventually, she met a new young man. They married and had a child. Ironically, her husband is also a New Yorker who sympathized in Communist theories. In the early days of her marriage, her American passport was confiscated, which she demanded be returned to her. This was the beginning of her troubles with the secret police. Her confusion and fear during interrogations were shown when she informed on her best friend, another American girl that she met on the steamliner to Russia. Between non-stop questions with little time to think, she betrayed her friend in order to save her own family. Which in the long run she does not, despite her efforts her husband was shot, she was imprisoned as a spy in a Holocaust-like concentration camp (think Meryl Streep in “Sophie’s Choice”), being worked to death while covered with scabs from scurvy among other deadly ailments. These scenes were very hard to read. But, what was even harder, for me, was reading how her own US Embassy would not let her through the gates. It seems the US considered Americans in Russia as “pinko” traitors.
Still, before her imprisonment, she appeared happy to live in an apartment that held 12 people, with a common outhouse and a common kitchen where one had to hide their food for fear of stealing. These so-called apartments had no privacy or any conveniences at all. Even, the light bulb in the entrance way was stolen so frequently that the residents were perpetually in the dark. While reading about the living conditions in “Patriots,” I had images of when the book and movie character “Dr. Yuri Zhivago” returned after the war to learn that his once-grand Moscow house had been divided into tenements. Her contentment to live this manner left her son, as well as this American reviewer, very confused about how easily she adjusted when “She had grown up on the elm-lined streets of Flat-bush, Brooklyn, debated… at Erasmus Hall High, studied mathematics among the first emancipated coeds at Brooklyn College, tuned in to Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats, and watched Cagney kiss Harlow on the projection screen at the Paramount.” How and why did this phenomenon happen?
Even in 1979, she refused to leave Russia to come to the US with her now grown son and his young family. She insisted that her life was in Russia, and this is the country where she belonged. Mother and son had many issues around this subject. The reader knows that the real problem was as a 6-year old boy her son, had no understanding that his mother didn’t abandon him, but was forcibly taken away from him. To make matters worse, the grown son was furious when he explained this to her and she replied that Russia takes care of their children.
Eventually, she does leave for America with her son, most likely to be with her grandson who she adored. Sill mother and son never got along. Until her last breath, she wished she stayed in Russia. “Maybe I would have been less hard on my mother had she been another ordinary Russian afflicted with that national form of Stockholm syndrome they call patriotism. But she wasn’t. She was, like I am now, an American….What I could not abide was her unwillingness to condemn the very system that had destroyed our family.” Sadly, what the son didn’t know was that when Stalin’s purges began, she decided it was time to go home. But, by then it was way too late.
Dare I say that this multigenerational saga will become a classic? The reader will go through the history of the pre-cold war, cold war, and post-cold told as a mother-son story. Once I finished the book, I wondered how the author’s own roots influenced her writing. Krasiko is a Jewish woman who was born in Ukraine and grew up in the former Soviet republic of Georgia before coming to New York. Her character of the mother was so complex I couldn’t help but wonder if she was a real person. Or maybe, my thoughts are due to the author’s talent?
The book ends with the mother’s younger brother giving her now almost senior citizen son possible clarity on his Mom’s stubbornness. Finally answering the how and why of the phenomenon of a typical Brooklyn girl becoming a loyal Communist party member. Maybe it had nothing to do with Russia at all but, rather her guilt. In her decision to leave for USSR she had hurt all those that she loved. It began with her family back in Brooklyn. Then it ended the life of her best friend, another 20-year old Brooklyn girl who also had dreams of a better world. As well as ending the life of her husband. And, clearly hurting her son in all stages of his life. Unfortunately, her youthful optimism backfired on her. The uncle suggested that just maybe, his sister felt as if she didn’t deserve the comforts of America or a good life anymore? She was a living epitome of a sad Russian poem. Before Stalin became a Bolshevik revolutionary he was a poet. Stalin is dead but his cruelty lives on.

I found <i>The Patriots</i> by Sana Krasikov to be a real <i>tour de force</i>. It is filled with so much history, from 1933 to the 2008, and takes place in the U.S., the Soviet Union and Russia since the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. Three generations of one family's lives are woven back and forth through different time periods.

In 1933 Florence Fein, a young woman from Flatbush, having finished college but with no firm idea of what she wants to do with her life, is taken with a Russian engineer whom she has met through her job with the Soviet Trade Mission. After he leaves to return to the Soviet Union she makes the decision to follow him. This is a monumental decision that only the young can make with so little knowledge of what she's getting herself into. Her family is dead set against her decision, having immigrated to the U.S. not so long ago, but she is idealistic and believes that in Soviet Russia her life will take on meaning.

Arriving in Moscow with a friend she's made on the boat, Essie, she must go east of the Ural Mountains Magnitogorsk to find her love. Eventually she finds him, but he only tells her to go back to America. Returning to Moscow, she meets another ex-patriot American and they have a son, Julien. They become swept up in the historical events, the war, the Jewish Anti-Fascist League and Stalin's purges. One by one they discover that they can't go home.

In the 1970s, after WWII, Stalin's purges and glasnost, Julien returns to America with his Russian born wife and child. His job will eventually take him, a designer of icebreaking tankers, works for several oil and gas companies. But he has other reasons to go. One is to see his son Lenny, who has been living in Moscow for nine years, unsuccessfully "chasing his fortune," and the other is to find out what happened to his mother, who for a time had been an NKVD informant and who would up in the gulag.

From Florence's stay in Magnitogorsk where she describes the barracks which "had no amenities at all-no kitchens or bathrooms or showers. Water came from an outdoor pump that was no broken, forcing the women and men who shared the 'dormitory' to walk a half-kilomenter to the next pump." She describes the stench of the outhouse and the relief to return to overcrowded barracks where one caught "the odor of cabbage soup and kerosene fumes down the hallways." Moscow is not much better, though there is indoor plumbing, but the gulag as described by Krasikov, is unforgettable, "A whole perverse manufactory in which human beings composed the raw material, and where the final products were ... what? Signed and stamped bits of paper. And, of course, slaves."

Such is the chilling, suspense in this rich tapestry of a novel that for much of it I could only read it for short periods of time. And it is not only the parts about Stalin's purges, but the sense that Russia under the oil oligarchs is no different.

I was amazed to find that indeed the U.S. and U.S.S.R. were doing business together in the 1920s and early 1930s. According to Wikipedia,"In 1928, a Soviet delegation arrived in Cleveland, Ohio to discuss with American consulting company Arthur G. McKee a plan to set up in Magnitogorsk a copy of the US Steel steel mill in Gary. The contract was four times increased and eventually the new plant had a capacity of over four million tons annually."
[from Imagining America: influence and images in twentieth-century Russia by Alan M. Ball, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003]

Masterful multi-generational drama that begs to be reread and savored as the story stays with you long after you have left it

The Patriots is a sweeping epic of a family story. It follows Florence, a young Jewish Brooklynite, as trades in a life in America for a life in the USSR in the 1930s. It also follows the story of her son, Julian, and her son' son, Lenny. Krasikov weaves together major events in the history of Russia, America, the Jewish people, and the world through the lives of these three characters.

I feel like sometimes you read a book at the perfect moment in your personal timeline and that is definitely the case with The Patriots. With relations between America and Russia being heavily discussed in the news, it was really wonderful to read a book that delved into Russian/American history from a personal perspective. It was really obvious while reading The Patriots that I do not know enough about this history, but that fact didn't really affect my enjoyment or ability to understand the story.

At times, I was slightly bored, in particular the set-up of Julian's business dealings in Russia. It took me quite a while to really get into the story, but I couldn't put the book down for the last quarter. I really admire the amount of history that Krasikov sprinkles throughout the book. Sometimes it's significantly more than a sprinkle. The history of Americans who went to the USSR and were basically abandoned by their American homeland is fascinating. Krasikov adeptly describes the hope and pain these individuals endured in their quest for freedom and justice.

Recommended for historical fiction lovers, Russian history junkies, big book lovers, multi-perspective storytelling, and the list goes on. Basically recommended for a lot of readers.

I could not get into this read. Way to long and very convoluted. It is one of my favorite time periods too! Not exactly sure what the problem was but not enough to keep me reading.

Having just finished one immigrant story, this was similar but in reverse. Young Florence leaves Brooklyn in search of love and a better life in Russia. Though the story was good, it was way too long for me.

Wow, this book was incredible! It's fascinating, heartbreaking, and beautiful. This is the type of book where you can tell the author really knows her stuff. There wasn't anything that felt forced or artificial. I thought it was brilliant and would highly recommend.!

Thank you NetGalley for a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review!

The author does well in portraying the struggle between worlds, American and Russian, played out in history through the lives and choices of the characters. The message and real truth found in the dichotomy of points of view and the impact of the choices we make on family and those around us weaves throughout the book as the author takes the reader back and forth through time. A decision in one decade and the ripple effect 50 years later.

I highly recommend The Patriots by Sana Krasikov to readers interested in smart, well-written Literary Fiction with a unique story, complex characters, and historical intrigue. Krasikov brings the reader into the mind of a young American women, Florence Fein, who chooses to go to Russia in the 1930s to follow her ideals of the socialist vision and encounters love, friendship, hope, betrayal, guilt, despair, torturous imprisonment, and ultimate release with the changing political climates from the 1930s to the 1980s. Florence is challenged to come to grips with the choices she has made and the impact those choices have on loved ones. Juxtaposed to Florence's story, is her son's more modern first-person narrative of his struggles to understand the life and decisions of his mother, and grasp the secrets that are ultimately revealed.

Most important is how absorbing it feels to live within the mood and tone of this exquisitely written novel. Krasikov should be applauded for her well-executed debut novel that allures the reader into a world most have very little experience in and she creates an atmosphere in which we gain a new-found knowledge.

I was given this book in exchange for an honest opinion.
THE PATRIOTS by Sana Krasikov tells the story of Florence Fein who leaves boring Brooklyn for the promise of a job, independence and potential love in the Soviet Union. She arrives in 1934 and believes she will help create the USSR believing in the socialist creed. She finds that life in the USSR is not what she expected but is not allowed to leave and must live under a totalitarian regime. Her story is interwoven with her son Julian’s story. While he immigrated to the U.S. as a young man, he’s back in Moscow on a business trip and is trying to learn the truth about his mother life while he was separated from her as a child. At the same time, he’s trying to convince his son, Lenny, who is in Moscow to make fast money to come back to the U.S. while he still can. This story moves back and forth between the three generations uncovering the love and secrets parents and children hide from one another.

I enjoyed this book and learned a lot about this time period in the USSR. However, I felt the the story dragged on in parts.