Invitation to a bonfire, by Adrienne Celt

Coincidentally, and before I knew I was soon to read Nabokov’s Pale fire, I picked up this new book by a young author.  It riffs on the relationship between Nabokov and his wife, Vera, who had a famously unusual marriage.  She devoted herself to him and his work, and also snatched Lolita literally out of the flames more than once.  In this novel, a young girl, Zoya, is smuggled out of Soviet Russia by do-good benefactors in the 1920s and given a new life at an expensive private girls school.  Not too surprisingly, she has difficulty fitting in.  She takes refuge in the school’s new greenhouse and the study of botany.  She continues to work at the school in the greenhouse after she graduates, despite the abuse she endures from the snobby young students.  Actually, she has few other options.  Then a famous Russian writer, Leo Orlov, along with his devoted and elusive wife, Vera, shows up to teach at the school.  His works have been exceptionally important to Zoya in her isolation, and she quickly falls into a sexual relationship with him.  Told through Zoya’s confessional writings, letters between the Orlovs, and the school's oral histories of these events years later, it packs quite a surprise at the end.  Even without the backstory of the Nabokov’s marriage, it is a fascinating exploration of identity. 234 pp.