Taking us through a year in Kamchatka, Disappearing Earth enters with astonishing emotional acuity the worlds of a cast of richly drawn characters, all connected by the crime: a witness, a neighbor, a detective, a mother.
Echoes of the disappearance reverberate across a tightly woven community, with the fear and loss felt most deeply among its women. In the ensuing weeks, then months, the police investigation turns up nothing.
maybe I misunderstood).One August afternoon, on the shoreline of the Kamchatka peninsula at the northeastern edge of Russia, two girls–sisters, eight and eleven–go missing. The way Alyona speculates makes it seem like this woman and Yegor argue all the time (obviously the argument and yelling they hear at the end is likely police coming to rescue them, but there seems to be a history of Yegor arguing with a woman. It’s possible that they may have been talking about Lilia, but I got the impression that Lilia was trapped in a room in the same conditions they were, so it’s likely that she wasn’t able to be out arguing with Yegor. Who was the woman living with Yegor in the house? In the final chapter, the girls hear yelling and wonder if it’s ‘the woman’ and Yegor arguing. How did you feel about Lada’s chapter in hindsight, knowing that Yegor, the man she almost ended up sleeping with, was the kidnapper? Marked spoilers follow for anyone who’s finished the story: A lot of it is very relatable and easy to understand.īut while it isn’t your typical thriller/mystery story, it does eventually give a satisfying and suspenseful climax, and I flew through the last fifty pages. Julia does a nice job of presenting these vastly different women from different stages of life in a way that is believable and entertaining, and without getting too much into spoiler territory yet, the issues dealt with range from the loss of loved ones, to the effects of dangerous or traditional masculinity on women, to being bored with life, to reconciling differences between how you and others see loved ones-just to name a few. Each point of view has only one chapter, and many times the point of view ends before the character’s conflict is dealt with (although some are tied up or hinted at in other chapters from a different point of view). But the story isn’t too focused on the disappearance and subsequent search-the book takes a turn after the first chapter and tells the story of a handful of women whose lives are affected, in big or small ways, by the girls’ disappearance. The story is framed around a pair of young girls who go missing on a geographically secluded Russian peninsula. I just finished this novel yesterday, and really enjoyed it.
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