Book notes: Disappearing Earth

By Julia Philips.

For Christmas the kids and I each picked out a book for mom as a competition to see who would pick the one she liked the best. I perused the National Book Award finalist list for 2019 to find this one.

The novel starts out with the kidnapping of 2 girls in the area around Petropavolsk, Russia. The story then develops several characters related to or affected by the kidnapping. It’s well-written, and wraps up with an interesting ending. The last 3 chapters were gripping.

The characters sometimes felt like a taxonomy of ways that women and native people can find themselves in miserable situations. At the end of a few of the chapters I thought “Blah” and wanted to throw the book out the window. I don’t have to read this.

I was entertained by the Katya and Max relationship. Max, who started out handsome and wonderful, “… could not always keep track of what was important. He did not seem as excellent to her now.” Max forgets the tent on their camping trip, which reminds me of several camping trips we’ve had. Max, however, loses the last shreds of empathy when the dog goes missing.

I like how the book lowered expectations of a happy ending, though I didn’t appreciate that until I finished.

I think it’s named Disappearing Earth because the landslide story (from the 1959 Kamchatka earthquake) the girls tell to one another was a metaphor for how the whole community of flawed characters came together to help out in the end.

I’m happy to have read this book.