Mother Country

December 1, 2018

After waiting ten years to get a visa for herself and her daughter Larissa to emigrate from Ukraine to the United States, Nadia discovers, to her horror, that only her application has been accepted. At the American embassy, she makes a split-second decision: to seize the opportunity to start making a better life for them both. Twenty-year-old Larissa will stay behind until her application for asylum is granted. Seven years later, Nadia is still slogging away as a nanny in Brooklyn and a home health caregiver, barely mustering the energy to join her few middle-aged Russian friends for the occasional ladies' night at a local club. Her Skype calls and texts with Larissa are limited, and it's clear that Larissa is bitter, their relationship strained. As Nadia obsessively tracks Vladimir Putin's aggressions toward the Ukraine and frets about Larissa's diabetes and access to insulin, she crafts a desperate plan so they can be reunited. Flashbacks give insight to Nadia's personality and her rationale for her decisions. She's a sympathetic, supremely practical, and deeply caring mother. VERDICT Reyn (What Happened to Anna K) has written a moving, contemporary look at the immigrant experience. Recommended.--Christine Perkins, Whatcom Cty. Lib. Syst., Bellingham, WA

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 15, 2018
Six years ago, Nadia left her only daughter, Larisska, behind in war-torn Ukraine. Since then, she's tried to bring her daughter to America, but she fears the reunion may bring even more problems.Back in Ukraine, Nadia worked as a bookkeeper for a pipe manufacturing company, a job that not only helped her pay the bills, but also brought a dashing midlevel manager, the technolog, into her orbit. One afternoon of illicit pleasure on his desk leads to Nadia's pregnancy, but the technolog has no intention of leaving his wife and daughter, so Nadia becomes a single mother. From birth, Larisska was anything but easy, refusing her own mother's milk but accepting the neighbor's. As tensions increase among western Ukrainians, separatists, and Russians, life in Nadia's neighborhood begins disintegrating, and soon the pipe company is paying its employees in mandarin oranges, good for selling on the black market but not so good for diabetic Larisska. Once the technolog reveals that the company is closing, Nadia and Larisska's application to leave Ukraine becomes even more urgent, but when their names finally reach the top of the list, 21-year-old Larisska has aged out, and Nadia chooses to go to America alone.. Devastated by her mother's decision, Larisska rarely even Skypes or texts with Nadia. One night, however, Nadia's friends convince her to go clubbing, and she concocts a scheme to get Larisska a green card--a scheme that will upturn Nadia's own life and perhaps bring a bit of romance into it. Reyn (The Imperial Wife, 2016) deftly spins a web of heartache and memory around Nadia's daily life. As she tries to handle the outrageous behavior of American toddlers and elderly Russian men with access to Viagra, her thoughts continually turn to her homeland.A compassionate portrait of a mother aching with regrets yet brave enough to fight for her family.

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November 1, 2018
Being a single mother is difficult enough, but Nadia Andreevna has it many orders of magnitude worse. The Brooklyn resident is trying to make ends meet through various jobs as a care provider, but she understandably can't distance herself from the war-torn Ukraine she had to flee from as a refugee. Worse, due to complications during the asylum process, Nadia had to leave her diabetic daughter, Larisska, back in the home country. Hanging on to a sliver of hope, Nadia longs for a way to accelerate her daughter's arrival in the U.S., but the wait is interminable, and during that separation, Larisska has grown into her own willful person. The story, switching between Brooklyn, Ukraine, and Russia, is ungainly and often veers into melodrama, leaving the characters with little room for growth. Yet Reyn (The Imperial Wife, 2016) delivers an elegiac look at the rootlessness that accompanies immigration while also tenderly capturing long-distance mothering and the challenges that all parents face when letting go engenders a terrible sense of powerlessness.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)