Andrea Thompson on Anya Ulinich's fantastic debut novel Petropolis:
Ulinich has a keen literary sensibility that brings forth the pathos of her heroine's quest without indulging in bathos. In a house where Sasha is treated as a generic Russian Jewish refugee, the point is subtly pressed by her observation of the art on her bedroom wall: "There was something peculiar about the picture: the particulars had been taken away. There was a boat without a name and a seagull without an eye. The cabin had a door without a handle."Easy sentimentality is also thankfully avoided. Sasha's long-sought father turns out to be a desperately cowardly man; after years away from her daughter, Sasha feels more fear than affection for the little girl, and she fantasizes about disconnecting her cell phone so she'll never know when her mother dies and leaves Nadia to Sasha's care. And Sasha's love for Jake, a young man with cerebral palsy, is more awkward and fraught than inspirational.
"How can you love someone whose body is another person's job," she wonders, and then sets about finding a way. At each turn, Sasha's role becomes something new: a fellow Russian, a big black girl to be feared, and first and foremost a Jew. The absurdity of these preconceptions, and the freedom to escape from them, is what shapes Ulinich's narrative and what forms its great optimism.
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