A review by ergative
The Line by Olga Grushin

Did not finish book. Stopped at 28%.
This book is set in a thinly veiled Soviet country, about half a generation after The Change, which is clearly a communist takeover of some kind. One day a line appears in front of a kiosk. The kiosk is closed, and no one knows what it sells when it's open, but people's lives are so bleak and empty that they stand in the line not because they want whatever it is that will be sold, but because the line is a symbol for some future good, of the hope that someday something worth having might be available to them. 

The book focuses on one particular family: an estranged husband and wife, the wife's mother, and their teenage son. The husband and wife and mother all remember life before the change, and grieve at what was lost, but the son is too young to remember what the alternative kind of life might be, and so struggles with an aimless dissatisfaction with the future he sees open to him, without knowing in any real sense what other kind of future he might build. 

All of these people have reasons for standing in that line, and the first third or so of the book focuses on their internal lives, their unhappinesses, their dissatisfactions and feeble attempts to make their lives better, all revolving, one way or another, around standing in this line.

It is a bleak, empty, unhappy book about bleak, empty, unhappy people. Maybe they'll be able to make things better in the second half, but if so I won't be here for it. I don't want to spend any more time in that world.