Phillips tells a complex and moving story, even in its brevity. Working together, the pace and constant perspective shifts create a melancholic vibe. The bad news is you never get to sink completely into any one woman’s story. The good news is she manages to make the story compelling and nuanced. If you’re asking how she does all this in a book that’s less than 300 pages, you’ve hit on the good news and the bad news. Phillips includes college students, indigenous people, villagers, city dwellers, career women, descendants of Russian settlers, mothers, daughters. What a challenging story structure to use, especially in a debut novel.Įach character’s life illustrates a different part of Kamchatka social realities. Some lines intersect, while others just sit in the vicinity of another. It’s like a pile of string, yarn, or rope. Then she uses a different woman in each following chapter to build the story in circles around the girls’ disappearance. Phillips starts with the missing girls in the first chapter. Still, Phillips’ location choice makes me want to know more about the region. So actually, life for the women in this story isn’t so different from other parts of the world. It combines both modern conveniences like cell phones, and long-established behaviors like misogyny. On the Kamchatka Peninsula in Eastern Russia, life is hard. In Disappearing Earth, author Julia Phillips transports the missing girl trope to a unique location.
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