Starred review from July 19, 2021
In Russian Armenian Gorcheva-Newberry’s vibrant collection, a series of immigrants embrace their adopted culture while remaining rootless and shackled to the past. “All of Me” depicts a brooding Russian writer living in Roanoke, Va., and her best friend Norma, an OB-GYN nurse with a strong libido. Both women are in their mid-40s and have each been married for nearly 20 years, yet the narrator feels disconnected from her husband and later receives a surprising confession from Norma. In “The Heart of Things,” 35-year-old Carmen has a job at a dinner theater in the U.S. while her older sister Leezy remains in their native Moscow. Carmen receives a message from Leezy informing her of their mother’s death, plunging her into a reverie over their differences; she then flies to Moscow for the funeral and brings her seatmate Josh, with whom she’d connected on the flight, and who ends up serving as pallbearer. The lyrical and haunting “Pictures of the Snow” follows a 60-something Russian woman’s disappearance. Her ex-husband, Richard, describes her as “fog falling over the mountains in great waves,” and returns to the family home searching for clues, wondering if she’d been an apparition all along. Throughout, the situations are arresting and the images indelible. Gorcheva-Newberry’s luminous prose will remain vivid in the reader’s mind.
July 15, 2021
A collection of short, melancholy stories focusing on Russian immigrants to the United States. The short stories in this debut collection chronicle the lives of characters beset by persistent regrets and dissatisfactions. Most of the central figures are Russian, and many have immigrated or are considering immigrating to the United States. Gorcheva-Newberry, herself a Russian �migr�, displays a keen understanding of her home country's cultural particularities in some of her collection's finest stories: In "Heroes of Our Time," a teenage boy ventures into Moscow in the spring of 1991 to attempt to recruit a sex worker on behalf of his ailing grandfather only to accidentally find himself entangled with a militant pro-aristocracy group. In "Boys on the Moskva River," the narrator remembers the life and violent death of his brother, Konstantin, whom their mother preferred and who was involved with organized crime. Gorcheva-Newberry's prose is clear and can quickly cut to the marrow of a complex emotional experience: In "The Suicide Note," a Russian immigrant reflects, "I thought how hard it was to make someone laugh in a foreign language. And if you couldn't laugh together, how could you live together? In that sense America remained a mystery to me." For all its strengths, however, this collection is a frustrating experience. Gorcheva-Newberry's skills as a prose stylist do not extend to dialogue, and many of her characters state their feelings in an unrealistically straightforward way. The collection's weakest stories lack the cultural and psychological specificity of its strongest and detract from the reading experience. "Simple Song #9," for instance, follows the romance and breakup of archetypal characters named "Boy" and "Girl," featuring dreary sentences like, "Girl meets Man." Gorcheva-Newberry is on firmer and more rewarding territory in her more conventional stories. A mixed effort with some real high points.
COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Starred review from August 1, 2021
Like many of the characters in her debut collection, winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prize in Fiction, Gorcheva-Newberry experienced the collapse of the Soviet Union before emigrating to the United States. In lyrical, evocative prose, her 16 substantial short stories explore themes of desire, absence, and loss. A young man in a dead-end job forms an unexpected bond with an elderly woman whose groceries he delivers. An actress returns to her native Russia to help her estranged sister arrange their mother's funeral. A woman brings her lover to the site of an unspeakable crime of passion. Some stories evoke dark fairy tales while others experiment with point of view, including one appropriately titled "Second Person," and another collectively narrated by the female residents of a Russian orphanage. In her acknowledgements, Gorcheva-Newberry thanks "the Literary Goddesses,"" namely Virginia Woolf and Alice Munro, both of whom appear in these stories, and Toni Morrison. Fans of the goddesses work and every reader who treasures powerful, surprising, and memorable short stories will find much to appreciate in this stunning first book. Watch for Gorcheva-Newberry's debut novel, The Orchard, next spring.
COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.