Review: A Life Change, Inside and Out, So Faithfully Delivered!
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 08 13, 2013
This is a story about Marina, a highly intelligent, ambitious Foreteen years old girl, who lives in Moscow. She is driven to learn English and prepare for her college exams, which are two years away, as a way of shaping her future. Her dream is to travel and see the world.The author, Julia Gousseva, sweeps us away into a different time and place, unfamiliar to most of us. She brings us into Marina's home, allows us to take snapshots of her family, feel the change of seasons going into a cold Russian winter, and hear her father's stories as he comes back home from his travels. We smell the aroma of Russian foods, such as modlovnik, as they are prepared by her Babushka (grandmother.)The descriptions are utterly honest, drawn faithfully and in precise, authentic detail, all of which builds our trust in the writing. Through the observant eyes of this sharp-minded girl, we become witnesses to an increasingly turbulent time of change: the Perestroika period, which restructured the Soviet political and economic system, and caused of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, during 1991-1992.I love the double twisted yarn where "life around Marina was changing, and she was changing too." How would she cope with these changes, in herself and in her country, which are beyond her anything she has imagined before?What a fascinating read! Five stars.