SOMETHING UNBELIEVABLE

Present and past mirror each other as an aged Russian woman tells her American granddaughter the story of their family’s struggles to survive the German invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II.

Kiev-born Kuznetsova begins her novel with a knowing nod to Russian literature: a formal character list that pointedly includes pet cats and gives clues to the plot ahead. The opening scene reads like a traditional framing device when Natasha, a Russian born, American-raised actress Skyping with her almost 90-year-old Baba Larissa in Kiev, asks for the full story behind how Larissa’s grandmother Tonya died in WWII. And at first, new mother Natasha’s typical millennial ambivalence toward domesticity seems less important than Larissa's story. In a tough, cynical voice devoid of sentimentality, Larissa describes how, in 1940, after a life of coddled comfort lasting through Communist rule, her suddenly penniless grandmother Tonya moved in with her engineer son, Fyodor, Larissa’s father. Soon Germany’s invasion forced Fyodor and family to evacuate Kiev to Lower Turinsk, accompanied by the Orlovs, a fellow engineer’s family. Tonya favored Larissa’s younger sister, Polya, whom the bookish 13-year-old Larissa considered a frivolous “lobotomized swan.” But family roles began to change as survival required increasingly difficult sacrifices and ethical choices. While Larissa discovered complicated romantic feelings toward the two Orlov brothers, Polya turned inward and Tonya grew pathetically demented. Meanwhile, the original framing device begins to dissolve as the secrets Larissa reveals (or keeps hidden) about herself and Tonya parallel the crises Natasha faces—loving her (unbelievably understanding) husband and infant daughter while becoming dangerously attracted to her husband’s friend Stas, who represents the free-spirited independence she craves. In shifting first-person narratives in which they analyze each other with assumptions that may or may not be accurate, Natasha and Larissa build a portrait of family love in all its variations.

Most compelling when history intersects with the emotions of women figuring out their lives today.