Winterland
A Novel
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3.6 • 8 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Perfection has a cost . . . With transporting prose and meticulous detail, set in an era that remains shockingly relevant today, Rae Meadows's Winterland tells a story of glory, loss, hope, and determination, and of finding light where none exists.
Soviet Union, 1973: There is perhaps no greater honor for a young girl than to be chosen for the famed USSR gymnastics program. When eight-year-old Anya is selected, her family is thrilled. What is left of her family, that is. Years ago, her mother disappeared without a trace, leaving Anya’s father devastated and their lives dark and quiet in the bitter cold of Siberia. Anya’s only confidant is her neighbor, an older woman who survived unspeakable horrors during her ten years imprisoned in a Gulag camp—and who, unbeknownst to Anya, was also her mother’s confidant and might hold the key to her disappearance.
As Anya rises through the ranks of competitive gymnastics, and as other girls fall from grace, she soon comes to realize that there is very little margin of error for anyone and so much to lose.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Spanning two decades, this brooding mystery/bildungsroman from Meadows (I Will Send Rain) begins in Norilsk, Siberia, in 1973, with eight-year-old Anya Petrova's acceptance into the Soviet gymnastics program. Anya's father, pyrometallurgist Yuri, is relieved; now that the Motherland considers his daughter an asset, they will take care of her—something he's felt increasingly unfit to do since his wife, Katerina, vanished three years earlier. Anya dreams of defying gravity, like Olympian Olga Korbut, and secretly hopes that if she makes the 1980 Moscow Olympics team, her mother will see her on television and come home. Katerina's disillusionment with the Communist Party likely got her in trouble, but it's also possible the former Bolshoi ballerina simply ran away to dance. Sections from the perspective of the Petrovas' elderly neighbor, Vera Kuznetsova, detail her own decade in the gulag, as well as conversations Vera had with Katerina that contextualize her disappearance. Though Katerina isn't the book's focus, her absence looms large, informing Yuri and Anya's every action. Meadows paints a poignant portrait of life behind the Iron Curtain, palpably conveying her vividly rendered characters' deprivation, longing, and self-sacrifice. Fans of Megan Abbott's You Will Know Me should take note.
Customer Reviews
A Nice Story
I enjoyed this story because I have an interest in Gymnastics and Russian history. However, I feel like the author left a lot out. The mothers mysterious disappearance is what kept me reading but that part of the story was never finished.