Disappearing Earth - Julia Phillips

 

I experienced/read Julia Phillips’s Disappearing Earth in its audiobook version. The book is narrated by Ilyana Kadushin, an experienced narrator of many previous audiobooks, including the popular YA Twilight series. Interestingly, as her name indicates, Kadushin is herself of Russian ancestry, lending an authenticity to her pronunciation of all the Russian surnames and place-names in the book. But, best of all, she is a great storyteller and very easy to listen to.

 Julia Phillips has had extraordinary success with Disappearing Earth, especially considering that it is her debut novel. The New York Times bestseller even went so far as to became a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award.  The story is set on a remote peninsula in the Russian Far East, a part of the world that is said to have one of the highest concentration of active volcanos anywhere. Kamchatka is, in fact, so remote that it is basically inaccessible by land, and is home to a mixture of Russians and an indigenous group of people known as the Even People. The bulk of the peninsula’s 315,000 population is concentrated in the capital city but there are much smaller native villages several hundred miles to the north. Phillips sets her novel in the capital and the much smaller native village called Esso. Remarkably enough, the author lived in Kamchatka as she researched her novel firsthand.

 

It all begins with the kidnapping of two little girls who are playing on the beach. Alyona and her younger sister, Sophia, disappear pretty much without a trace except for one witness who thinks she saw them getting into a shiny black car with a large blonde man. As you would expect, the girls’ parents are devastated by the loss of their daughters and the uncertainty of their fate, but life has to go on. Everyone understands that because the girls do not turn up within the first twenty-four hours of their disappearance, they are most likely already dead. Within weeks, the police have pretty much given up the search and are waiting for the winter thaw so that they can begin a search for the bodies of the two little girls. The only one who refuses to give up is their mother.

 There are thirteen chapters in Disappearing Earth, each of them narrated by a revolving cast of female characters who, taken together, give a clear picture of what life in Kamchatka is like for women. And it is not a pretty picture. None of the women appear to be much happy with the lives they live there, lives they correctly believe to be second class to those of their husbands and boyfriends. Readers get a clear message, too, that the indigenous population of Kamchatka is generally looked down upon by the Russians who now live there. So much so, that the disappearance of a native girl a bit older than Alyona and Sophia is quickly written off as being simply the case of a teen runaway.

 

Bottom Line: Disappearing Earth is a highly atmospheric novel with a deeply felt sense of place, one in which readers will easily immerse themselves. What did not work so well for me is that the “middle” eighty percent of the book is used only to illustrate the ripple effect that the kidnapping has on various secondary characters – all of whom seem already to hate their lives. The girls disappear in the first pages of the book, and the case does not advance again until its final two chapters. I found myself growing more and more impatient until I finally realized that this is not intended to be a mystery at all.

Narrator Ilyana Kadushin