Snow in May

March 17, 2014
Melnik models her debut on J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories by creating nine slice-of-life portraits that introduce us to a series of interrelated characters living in Magdan, Russia. The protagonists live in different decades, vary in age, and each experience different trials—yet they all carry the soul of Magdan. The stories involve the KGB, Russian dance, witch doctors, unhealthy love, neglected children, and inescapable poverty. The thematic explorations of the collection are similarly far-ranging: the inner battle between desire and responsibility (“Love, Italian Style, or in Line for Bananas”); the tendency to over-idealize the past (“Closed Fracture”); the demons of addiction (“Strawberry Lipstick”); and the sacrifices required to love freely (“Our Upstairs Neighbor”) . Although each of the nine stories can stand on its own, they have a cumulative effect when read together. Melnik tackles tragic subject matter while dramatizing daily struggles, giving equal weight to both. With dry humor and detailed description, Melnik creates a historically enlightening time capsule of an unfamiliar world.

Starred review from April 1, 2014
Despite long winters and a haunting past, a remote town thrums with life. The Russian port town of Magadan, a former threshold into the Stalin-era gulags, links the characters in Melnik's gorgeous debut collection of short stories. Balanced on the eastern edge of Russia, Magadan is home to an eclectic population, including engineers and artists who first worked in the forced-labor camps and then stayed, working side by side with their former guards. Everyone endures deprivation, isolation, resignation. Worse, the past seems to linger in the blood, contaminating relationships and tainting dreams. In the best of her tales, Melnik's characters--many of whom pop up in more than one story, as Melnik traces the fortunes of friends, relatives and descendants--long for at least a reprieve, if not a transcendent moment. A young wife and mother travels to Moscow for the annual shopping trip, waiting in endless lines for items unavailable back home, such as fresh fruits, school supplies and boots. Can she resist an Italian soccer player who tempts her with a night without drudgery? Craving the freedom she believes marriage offers, a young woman weds a military school graduate posted even further east. Can she make her marriage successful through the sheer force of her will? A mother takes her daughter, beset by mysterious migraines, to visit a witch with curious healing methods. A young boy performing Tchaikovsky finds his thoughts invaded by memories--memories he could not possibly possess himself but which must inhabit the music. Curious about the famous tenor who missed his own celebratory concert, a young woman asks her grandfather to tell her the story of the man's life. Yet the tale leaves her unsettled about her country's past and her own future. Achingly beautiful, this collection signals a writer to watch.

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Starred review from May 15, 2014
In her first book, Melnik's nine tender, linked stories constitute a stark mural painted against the backdrop of political change in late-twentieth-century Russia and the Soviet Union, images only a Russian could craft. Pre-perestroika, post-perestroika, it all makes little difference to the residents of cold, snowbound Magadan on the northeast Russian coast. Melnik knows these people well, and portrays them and their determination, stoicism in the face of regime changes, and dry sense of dark humor with an economy of language that mirrors their economy of life. There is the young mid-century woman who yearns only to escape the crowded bed she shares with her two sisters and who grasps at the only available route, marriage. She learns too late that life as a military officer's wife can be its own punishment. The glasnost generation differs little, caught up as it is in the fantasies that television delivers. It's difficult to pick a favorite among Melnik's striking tales, but Love, Italian Style, the story of busy working mother Tanya on a trip from Magadan to Moscow to stock up on provisions, creates a surge of poignancy that sets the tone for all the others in this affecting and timely collection.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)