Disappearing Earth
Ratings5
Average rating3.6
One August afternoon, two sisters—Sophia, eight, and Alyona, eleven—go missing from a beach on the far-flung Kamchatka Peninsula in northeastern Russia. Taking us through the year that follows, Disappearing Earth enters the lives of women and girls in this tightly knit community who are connected by the crime: a witness, a neighbor, a detective, a mother. We are transported to vistas of rugged beauty—open expanses of tundra, soaring volcanoes, dense forests, the glassy seas that border Japan and Alaska—and into a region as complex as it is alluring, where social and ethnic tensions have long simmered, and where outsiders are often the first to be accused.
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Phillips's writing is evocative and emotional and gives the reader glimpses into the lives of women who are all connected to one another through the disappearance of two sisters. The book's chapters function as vignettes which could stand on their own, but, although there is a character list, I sometimes lost the thread of how all the women were connected. As I was reading, I thought the book was solid with beautiful writing, but the ending and the way Phillips' writing built suspense and anticipation and raw emotion really left an impact and bumped the book up a rating in my mind. Overall, I think the book explores the ways in which men harm women and looks at women's value in Russian society, especially through the comparison of treatment between Indigenous and Russian girls/women.
I think I have a lot to say about this book, the most important things being that it's beautifully written and a compelling story, not only about the disappearance of some girls in Kamchatka but also about life of the people of the peninsula, about which most of us in the US know very little.
But I also want to say that the book feels to me like a tightly linked novel in stories, rather than a straight-forward novel. Each chapter gives us a different story with its own arc about different people tied in various ways to the girls who have disappeared. This isn't a criticism in any way, as I like the form (and have used it myself) but just an observation that I haven't heard anyone else make.
And finally, it is interesting to me that no one (that I've heard) has accused this author of cultural appropriation, even though a good deal of the book is about the native people of Kamchatka. Given the controversy around the book American Dirt, I'm surprised. Is it because this book is better researched and written? Or is it because it takes place so far away and there is no one here to object on behalf of the indigenous people? (I'm not raising the issue because I personally object; in fact, I think much of the criticism of American Dirt is misguided.)
