whazzle

Child 44

This was a surprising read, actually, because I thought it would be essentially a brainless thriller airport book. And it sort of is, and it sort of isn't.

It made the rounds through my family a few months ago - it's the first book in a trilogy (I won't go out of my way to read the other two but if they pop up I will probably at the very least flip through them) about the Soviet Union under Stalin with an action hero type protagonist in the form of Leo Demidov. There's a sharp divide between "official" reality and ACTUAL reality, which is shown most clearly when a serial killer is on the loose hunting children - something that cannot happen in a Utopian state, and so is denied to be happening on multiple levels, etc and so forth. A lot of the details are gone from my mind now because it's been so long since I read the book.

Things that stood out: the atmosphere - deprivation and ruin and exploitation, the community/politics, the food mentions/descriptions, the self-brain-washing Leo had to do, the perfunctory meth use, the violence (I thought it was well done and appropriate, but I'm not a scholar of the time period, so take that with a grain of salt), Leo's awakening to the way others live in this state, Raisa - Leo's wife whose entire arc is magnificent, her history and rationale and the way she fights and angles in every way possible to survive and how all of the harsher actions and thoughts she exhibits are not shown to make her into a villain but shown to be entirely justified and smart (I loved her a lot. So much. God).

Things that I thought were weak: the writing alternatively worked for me and got supremely annoying. There were so many ellipses and sentence fragments and it got to be a little bit TOO MUCH. I get that he was probably going for something stylistically speaking but jfc. I kept wanting to edit it while I was reading. Also there was a huge plot element that I thought was stupid and unnecessary and actually lessened the impact and the horror rather than heightened it. The story would have been better served without it (and many degrees of magnitude more believable, too).

I don't know that I would re-read this because it was a very depressing book, but a very interesting one too.