Good Citizens Need Not Fear
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
FINALIST FOR THE WRITERS' TRUST FICTION PRIZE
FINALIST FOR THE RAKUTEN KOBO EMERGING WRITER PRIZE
A GLOBE AND MAIL BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
"Bang-on brilliant." --Miriam Toews
"Luminous" --Yann Martel
"Outstanding." --Anthony Doerr
"Bright, funny, satirical and relevant. . . . A new talent to watch!" --Margaret Atwood (via Twitter)
This brilliant and bitingly funny novel-in-stories, set in and around a single crumbling apartment building in Soviet-era Ukraine, heralds the arrival of a major new talent.
A cast of unforgettable characters--citizens of the small industrial town of Kirovka--populate Maria Reva's ingeniously entwined tales that span the chaotic years leading up to and immediately following the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989. Weaving the strands of the narrative together is an unforgettable, chameleon-like young woman named Zaya: an orphan turned beauty-pageant crasher who survives the extraordinary circumstances of her childhood through a compelling combination of ferocity, intelligence, stubbornness and wit.
Good Citizens Need Not Fear takes us from paranoia to tenderness and back again, exploring what it is to be an individual amid the roiling forces of history. Inspired by her family's own experiences in Ukraine, Reva brings the dark absurdity of early Gary Shteyngart, the empathy of Miriam Toews, and the sly interconnectedness of Anthony Marra's The Tsar of Love and Techno to a sparkling work of fiction that is as clever as it is heartfelt.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
The ironic title of Maria Reva’s debut captures the spirit of her story collection about a small Ukrainian town around the time of the Soviet Union’s collapse. With keen, spare prose, Reva conjures a world that’s both jarringly bleak and delightfully absurd. In one story, a canned-foods worker strives to engineer a triangular vegetable to capitalize on space. In another, a Communist official struggles to coerce an apology out of a poet who offers up countless other words. Thanks to Reva’s brilliant blend of wry satire and surrealism, these darkly amusing fables read like instant classics.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Reva's hilarious, absurdist debut collection lampoons the crumbling bureaucracy leading up to the fall of the Soviet Union. In "Novostro ka," a young man discovers that, due to a clerical error, his entire building doesn't exist in the eyes of the government, and he follows a vertiginous, Kafkaesque course to get his heat turned on. The vicious and vulnerable Zaya, born with a cleft lip and left to an orphanage, and a poet-turned-government official named Konstantyn Illych, are indelible recurring characters. In "Little Rabbit," four-year-old Zaya manages to escape the orphanage after discovering the mummified corpse of another orphan who was buried under the linoleum, which she takes for a saint sent to guide her out. "Miss USSR" picks up with Zaya as a teenager, having been returned to the orphanage. Konstantyn recruits her to take part in a national beauty pageant, and she disappears after spitting on the judges during the show, leaving Konstantyn with the orphan corpse that she'd kept after her escape. Later, in "Lucky Toss," the disgraced Konstantyn makes money by charging religious fanatics to see the corpse, or "saint." Reva delights in the strange situations caused by political dysfunction, while offering surprising notes of tenderness as ordinary people learn to get by. The riotous set pieces and intelligent gaze make this an auspicious debut.
