Disappearing earth, by Julia Phillips

Don’t you love it when a book so captures you that you can hardly wait to recommend it to your friends?  This is one such novel, a debut by author Phillips.  Set in a remote area that most people, certainly including me, know little or nothing about, it is ostensibly a mystery story – two young sisters have vanished – but that is just the framework for this deeply affecting book.  The Kamchatka Peninsula hangs down off northern Russia.  There are mountains, volcanoes, hot springs, small native settlements, and a few larger towns.  Travel is difficult outside of the cities – roads peter out and you can really only leave by ship or plane.  That’s one reason that the complete disappearance of 8 year old Sophia and 11 year old Alonya is so puzzling.  A complex cast of characters is introduced in separate chapters (a key at the front helps the non-Russian speaking reader keep track of the names and relationships), with an emphasis on the women.  Eventually these threads will all interweave.   The Russian mother, Marina Alexandrova,a has lost her two daughters in the major city’s center, but four years earlier, Alla Innokentevna, a native woman, also had her older teenage daughter disappear from their remote community.  Not surprisingly, the latter is dismissed as a runaway, while the Russian’s children are the focus of months’ long searches and media coverage.  The cultural divides in this remote area are also fascinating and feel familiar – older Russians are still somewhat nostalgic for the orderly days of the Soviet Union’s domination; native populations struggle with poverty and the loss of older ways as well; and younger people of all types despair of finding meaningful work or life partners.  Women are still an underclass.  Things shift under them, like the tsunami in 1952 that swept away a whole town.   Many of these individual stories are heartbreaking.  255 pp.