Elizabeth Kiem

Dancer Daughter Traitor Spy begins as a ballet story about a Bolshoi ballet school student and quickly evolvers into a political thriller set in 1980s Russia. There’s an element of magical realism, since both the protagonist, Marya, and her mother see violent visions of the past and future. And one such vision (of a Soviet atrocity) results in her ballerina mother, an international celebrity, being abruptly removed from the ballet company.
November dusk slips into Moscow like a spy; you don’t know it’s there until it’s stolen the day and vanished into the dark. But on the night that my mother disappears from my life, I could swear I see it happen. The arrival of twilight – not my mother’s disappearance. That’s something I don’t see coming. Not until it’s too late. Not until she’s already gone.
The beginning is little slow, building up the Russian context of extreme paranoia and foreboding, but the story picks yup when Marya and her father arrive as refugees in the United States. Some of Marya’s observations are astute – the fact that her father uses the past tense to discuss her mother and she uses the future. “There is no present tense.” Migrants everywhere will recognise that dislocated space outside time, which Kiem represents perfectly. Despite her attempts to pursue a ballet career, Marya is marking time, trying to integrate into the local school, learning new fashion, new music and new slang, while her father and black-marketeer ‘uncle’ subject themselves to all manner of political contortions in hope of freeing his wife from prison. The Russian ghetto of Brighton Beach seems so claustrophobic that one feels they have exchanged on Russian prison for another, albeit one of their own making. As Marya says “The rules are: if you pose a problem for the Party, if you are a risk to the People, you must be dispensed with. So we are following the rules. We are dispensing of ourselves before the KGB can do it.” Whether or not they are able to escape this prison, I leave to the reader.
This is less thriller than exploration of cold war politics. It clearly depicts the privileged peril of Russian celebrity, the integration of black marketeers into everyday Russian life, the paranoia of Russian immigrants in the US and – inevitably – the powerful pull of the bratva for migrants who have arrived in a foreign country with new names, new language and new alphabet but no papers. While I found the instalove annoying and the final twist (and Marya’s acceptance of it) unbelievable, it was fairly well paced and the dialogue is very relatable. I would certainly like to read the rest of the series to find out how Marya deals with the repercussions of this event. Recommended to teens and adults who enjoy a low-key thriller with a strong early-80s flavour.… (altro)

Marina's mother, Sveta, is the Soviet Union's star ballerina in 1986. When Sveta has visions of a horrific USSR secret, she mysteriously goes missing. Marina and her father flee to Brooklyn to escape the KGB, the Soviet Union's secret police. Marina and her father must adapt to life in Brooklyn without Sveta, but Marina's father can't let her disappearance go. He gets mixed up in the Russian mob in an effort to get Sveta back to their family in the United States. Marina finds herself caught up in her father's mistakes, despite her efforts to make a name for herself as an American ballerina at Julliard. This book had a slow beginning and I was hoping for more ballet aspects in the story, but the plot proved to be a good young adult and historical fiction read.

Taylor W. / Marathon County Public Library
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… (altro)