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A review by spacestationtrustfund
Oksana, Behave! by Maria Kuznetsova
3.0
When I was around six years old, my family packed up and moved from our sunny, ocean-adjacent little suburb up north, where it was cold and mountainous and I saw snow for the first time. We were still in the same country, everyone spoke the same language, but the landscape and the people were so staggeringly different. I was too young at the time to understand the value of those differences, and what little dialect I'd picked up before relocating was quickly lost (to my eternal chagrin). We were still near to the ocean, but a different ocean—the beach had high cliffs, chilly wind, rocks and cold gravel instead of warm sand. The very topography of my life had changed.
Oksana and her family are from Ukraine, and they move to America when Oksana is very small. Character-driven, the story follows Oksana as she grows up, struggles with the new and different culture, and gets into a lot of trouble. It also addresses the reality of many immigrants: Oksana's father is an accomplished physicist in Ukraine, but in America, he works a fast food delivery job to make ends meet. Oksana herself is a difficult child, as to be expected given her circumstances—she has no filter, is very hands-on in a practical and often dangerous way (such as testing if 911 actually works by calling and claiming her grandmother is trying to kill her). She really doesn't know how to behave, which does get rather tiresome after a while. Reading this novel felt a lot like babysitting a particularly precocious and stubborn kid, but with real intelligence underneath—after all, Oksana is always finding new and creative ways to cause trouble!
The real strength of the novel was towards the end, when Oksana visits her grandmother back in Ukraine, and gains a new understanding of the culture she left behind and the balance between her Ukrainian and her American selves. I felt as though the novel pulled back from really delving into how this culture shock and upheaval truly affected Oksana, how it influenced her (beyond the surface-level misbehaving), and how much of her "acting out" was because of this situation or just due to her personality. Oksana is not a likeable character, but she's a very relatable one; I think part of what spurred me on through this book was the connection I felt with this young girl who was visibly struggling to reconcile her world. I didn't "act out" in all the ways Oksana did, I turned that inwards and was a bit of a teacher's pet and overachiever—being a child of immigrants is a constant story of trying to prove you're worth it—but much of what Oksana was experiencing felt right at home with my own experiences.
Oksana and her family are from Ukraine, and they move to America when Oksana is very small. Character-driven, the story follows Oksana as she grows up, struggles with the new and different culture, and gets into a lot of trouble. It also addresses the reality of many immigrants: Oksana's father is an accomplished physicist in Ukraine, but in America, he works a fast food delivery job to make ends meet. Oksana herself is a difficult child, as to be expected given her circumstances—she has no filter, is very hands-on in a practical and often dangerous way (such as testing if 911 actually works by calling and claiming her grandmother is trying to kill her). She really doesn't know how to behave, which does get rather tiresome after a while. Reading this novel felt a lot like babysitting a particularly precocious and stubborn kid, but with real intelligence underneath—after all, Oksana is always finding new and creative ways to cause trouble!
The real strength of the novel was towards the end, when Oksana visits her grandmother back in Ukraine, and gains a new understanding of the culture she left behind and the balance between her Ukrainian and her American selves. I felt as though the novel pulled back from really delving into how this culture shock and upheaval truly affected Oksana, how it influenced her (beyond the surface-level misbehaving), and how much of her "acting out" was because of this situation or just due to her personality. Oksana is not a likeable character, but she's a very relatable one; I think part of what spurred me on through this book was the connection I felt with this young girl who was visibly struggling to reconcile her world. I didn't "act out" in all the ways Oksana did, I turned that inwards and was a bit of a teacher's pet and overachiever—being a child of immigrants is a constant story of trying to prove you're worth it—but much of what Oksana was experiencing felt right at home with my own experiences.