Review: The Russian Concubine

What a misleading title and cover. There aren't any concubines in the book but that does not make it bad.

The story begins as the Friis family is leaving Russia during the Revolution and their train gets stopped by the Red Army. The family gets separated and the mother and daughter are allowed to continue on the Junchow, China.

Lydia, the daughter, grows up in the Russian Settlement of Junchow with her mother. As White Russians, they are stranded there without passports or money to leave. Her mother, an alcoholic, is not supporting her daughter as she should and Lydia takes to stealing to support her mother. When she is rescued out of a compromising situation on in an alley by a Chinese teenager, her life changes.

I like the history of this book. I have read other novels of lives in rich English Settlements in Shanghai but this book explored those in the seedier European settlements and what was going on China in the 1920s.

The cover and the title annoyed me a little, I will be honest and I might have rated it higher but the annoyance won out. I will read the next book in the series The Girl from Junchow based on the ending that hooked me

Review: Deathless

Synopsis from Goodreads:

Koschei the Deathless is to Russian folklore what devils or wicked witches are to European culture: a menacing, evil figure; the villain of countless stories which have been passed on through story and text for generations. But Koschei has never before been seen through the eyes of Catherynne Valente, whose modernized and transformed take on the legend brings the action to modern times, spanning many of the great developments of Russian history in the twentieth century.

Deathless, however, is no dry, historical tome: it lights up like fire as the young Marya Morevna transforms from a clever child of the revolution, to Koschei’s beautiful bride, to his eventual undoing. Along the way there are Stalinist house elves, magical quests, secrecy and bureaucracy, and games of lust and power. All told, Deathless is a collision of magical history and actual history, of revolution and mythology, of love and death, which will bring Russian myth back to life in a stunning new incarnation.

I loved this retelling of Russian folklore set around the time of Stalin and World War II. I knew nothing of Koschei and house elves prior to reading this book. Now I want to know more.

The heroine of the story, Marya Morevna, watched birds become men who came to claim her sisters as wives. She waited for the day a bird would come to claim her. Marya was able to communicate with the house elves, who like the outside world of Soviet Russia, has organized in committees.

Koschei, in the form of a bird, eventually comes for Marya  and thus begins her journey through the folklore of Russia intertwined with 20th Century Soviet history.

This book does not gloss over that history but it made me want to learn more about it it with Valente’s prose. I recommend this rewriting of a fairy tale.