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whatlizisreadingnow 's review for:
Atomic Anna
by Rachel Barenbaum
Overall: A multi-generational family story focused on mothers and daughters, Atomic Anna stretches across much of the 20th century. The Anna of the title is Anna Berkova, a Soviet nuclear scientist living in Pripyat (the city supporting Chernobyl) at the time of the accident in 1986. When she discovers that the accident caused her to jump through time, confirming theories she’s been working on for decades, Anna decides to build a time machine to both prevent the nuclear meltdown and fix everything that’s gone wrong with her family. In vignettes told from the perspectives of Anna, her daughter Molly, and her granddaughter Raisa, the reader follows Anna’s family from the revolution of 1917 all the way up to the early 1990s, through pre-World War II Berlin, Molly’s journey to Philadelphia with her adoptive parents, her relationship with drugs and alcohol, the birth of Raisa, and Raisa’s adolescence. Please don’t shy away from this book if you don’t usually read science fiction! If you can follow Back to the Future, you can read this one!
Likes: The three narrators’ stories weave together seamlessly, even through multiple jumps of time and perspective. Anna’s a scientist, Molly becomes a struggling artist, and Raisa has a calling for mathematics. The book addresses the Jewish experience in Russia and Europe more broadly as well as the experience of Soviet Jewish immigrants in the United States. It also addresses the complicated relationship between work, motherhood, and personal identity. And there are all kinds of mothers: very young mothers, older first-time mothers, adoptive mothers, eager mothers, reluctant mothers. This is a long book, but towards the end the pace picked up and I could not turn the pages fast enough!
Dislikes: I would have liked to understand a little better why Yasha chose Anna. (Anything more would be a spoiler!)
FYI: one of the characters develops a serious addiction to drugs and alcohol. There are scenes of child neglect and references to Nazi crimes during the Holocaust. There are a couple of very brief scenes related to gun violence.
Likes: The three narrators’ stories weave together seamlessly, even through multiple jumps of time and perspective. Anna’s a scientist, Molly becomes a struggling artist, and Raisa has a calling for mathematics. The book addresses the Jewish experience in Russia and Europe more broadly as well as the experience of Soviet Jewish immigrants in the United States. It also addresses the complicated relationship between work, motherhood, and personal identity. And there are all kinds of mothers: very young mothers, older first-time mothers, adoptive mothers, eager mothers, reluctant mothers. This is a long book, but towards the end the pace picked up and I could not turn the pages fast enough!
Dislikes: I would have liked to understand a little better why Yasha chose Anna. (Anything more would be a spoiler!)
FYI: one of the characters develops a serious addiction to drugs and alcohol. There are scenes of child neglect and references to Nazi crimes during the Holocaust. There are a couple of very brief scenes related to gun violence.