So I tried to read this book, I really did. I really wanted to like it, but I could not get past page 100. It was too bizarre, too depressing and just too hard to follow. I hope someone else can love this little book, because I just couldn't. ( )

I read this book, but I wasn't very fond of it.
To me it wasn't as interesting as the blurp on the back side cover promised. Too bad, but matbe it was not the right book at the right time. ( )

This novel is lots of fun: it's a beautifully written debut that combines humor with a picture of the depressing landscape of glasnost'-era Russia.

I particularly enjoyed the first and last fourths of the book, though the middle also presented memorable characters and settings. ( )

I liked this a lot. Ulinich manages to weave so many individual characters, settings, and situations into this very cool and atmospheric mosaic—I was pleased at the end how complete the whole she built out of all these parts felt. I'm also partial to her style, warm and droll. This was a sweet book, and a lot of fun. ( )

A beautiful study of character, and the most robust collection of metaphor I think I've ever read. ( )

In Petropolis, we meet Sasha Goldberg--an awkward, overweight, precocious Jew growing up in poverty in economically depressed Siberia. Wanting more from life, she signs up as a Russian mail order bride, and after landing in America, ditches her new husband and heads in search of the father who abandoned her. As she maneuvers across the US, she meets a plethora of dinged and damaged characters and ultimately, finds her father and herself.

Lively, hysterical, pathetic and gloomy, this bildungsroman is darkly comical. With wit and honest observations, it has moments of poignancy without ever becoming maudlin. Beginning as a malcontent but still cocooned in a juvenile's idealism, Sasha evolves from a lumbering child into a world-wise adult. The stories of her father, his new wife and her mother are woven into the narrative and tells of their own disillusionment and development-reinforcing how our different experiences and cultural mores shape who we are and what we believe.

Always present is the connectedness of the Russian immigrant population and the longing they feel for those who remind them of home. Acclimating isn't easy, and their unique perspectives highlight the absurdities of American and Russian conventions. When culture shock results from these worlds colliding, it's both amusing and meaningful.

This book was more than just the comical account of Sasha's tragic coming of age. With themes such as the immigrant experience, interconnectedness, selfishness, shattered illusions, discrimination, poverty and our own hypocrisy, it was thought-provoking and meaty.

From a fearful height, a wandering light,
but does a star glitter like this, crying?
Transparent star, wandering light
your brother, Petropolis, is dying.

From a fearful height, earthly dreams are alight,
and a green star is crying.
Oh star, if you are the brother of water and light,
your brother, Petropolis, is dying.

A monstrous ship, from a fearful height,
is rushing on, spreading its wings, flying.
Green star, in beautiful poverty,
your brother, Petropolis, is dying.

Transparent spring has broken, above the black Neva’s hiss
the wax of immortality is liquefying.
Oh if you are star – your city, Petropolis,
your brother, Petropolis, is dying.
–Osip Mandelstam

Sasha Goldberg has a hard life in Asbestos 2, a dying town in Siberia. Her father has either disappeared or left his family, her mother is very high-strung and a bit crazy, and her community is almost completely in shambles. After securing a coveted position in a prestigious art school, Sasha, too, leaves it all to become a mail order bride to an American. In America, she learns English, lives in Arizona, Chicago, and New York, and tries to find her father. In doing all this, she is also trying to find herself and come to terms with her past and her homeland.

I could say so much more about the basic plot of the book, but I always hesitate to give away too many spoilers. Sasha was a very unique character, and I enjoyed reading about her and seeing her development from a young girl to a young woman. The imagery in the book was also done very well. The descriptions of the poverty in Asbestos 2 were especially convincing, and there is a scene at the end of the book that I found particularly chilling (but fascinating). In fact, the last few pages of the book impressed me enough to raise my rating from a 4 to a 4.5. I highly recommend this book to those who are interested in Russian history and/or the immigrant experience. ( )

"Petropolis" beginnt so: "Im Herbst 1992 hatte Ljubow Alexandrowna Goldberg beschlossen, ihrer vierzehnjährigen Tochter ein ausserschulisches Betätigungsfeld zu schaffen. "Kinder der Intelligenzija hocken nicht nachmittags zu Hause und frönen der Idiotie’, erklärte sie. Am liebsten hätte sie Sascha am Klavier gesehen, aber Goldbergs hatten kein Klavier, und in den beiden vollgestopften Zimmern, die Sascha und ihre Mutter bewohnten, war nicht mal genug Platz für den Gedanken an ein Klavier."
In der Folge wird Sascha, die mit ihrer Mutter im sibirischen Gulag-Aussenposten Asbest 2 lebt, ungewollt schwanger, dann als Kunststudentin in Moskau aufgenommen (es geht dabei zwar nicht mit rechten Dingen, doch sehr lebensecht zu und her) und kommt schliesslich als Mailorder-Braut nach Phoenix, Arizona, entflieht ihrem Amerikavisum-Aufenthaltsbeschaffer nach Chicago, wo sie in privilegierten Umständen als Quasi-Sklavin gehalten wird und schliesslich für ein angemessen glückliches Ende der Geschichte in Brooklyn landet, wo sie auch ihren nach Amerika abgehauenen Vater aufstöbert.

2.version:
Sasha Goldberg is the ultimate outsider: she’s a chubby, biracial Jewish girl from the Siberian town of Asbestos 2. Her father takes off for the United States, and leaves Sasha to navigate adolescence in a bleak apartment bloc with her overbearing mother. Sasha falls in love with an art school drop-out who lives inside a concrete pipe in the town dump. Following her heart gets her into trouble at home, so she flees Russia as a mail-order bride and lands in suburban Arizona. Sasha manages to escape her Red Lobster-loving fiancé and embarks on a misadventure-filled journey across America in search of her father. ( )

I love any book that is about post-Communist Russia. Therefore I bought this book from the remainder table as soon as I realized that that was what it was about. We in the west can only imagine what the breakdown of normal life was like after the Soviet Union fell apart. State services were apparently fairly consistently available until 1989, but after that the level of security is quite appalingly bad. The girl who is the main character in this story is an art student. Her existence is quite gloomy.
Living here in my pampered state here in the West, I have no concept of what it is like to live in Russia today. But this book certainly goes a long way towards enlightening me on that topic. I will definitely be watching this author for follow-up books as this was a very fine effort. Very well edited. No longeurs. The sense of dramatic scene construction, irony, and hunour, are all near flawless, as much as I can tell.

This book was disgusting.
What kind of fourteen year old girl pleasures herself on a bus?

This book was terrible. I tried forcing myself to read through the whole thing; but after I read about her having to count the blinds while her husband had sex with her and when he took too long she'd square the number...I was done. ( )

This touching tale of one girl's journey from innocence to mail-order bride tells the story of Sasha Goldberg's quest to find a place for herself in the world. As she travels from Siberia to the United States, Sasha carries a dream of reuniting with her father, a man she has idealized since his departure from Russia years before. Unfortunately, the more time she spends in America, the more Sasha learns about her father and his new life, and the less she is able to maintain that childish vision of him.

I thought this was an excellent look what might drive a young girl to offer herself as a mail-order bride in search of a better life in America. It is definitely a better treatment of this subject than another book I read this year, Moonlight in Odessa. Sasha's situation is never romanticized and the reader definitely feels for her as betrayals build and her disillusionment grows. Well-written and sensitively portrayed, Sasha is a standout protagonist whose moving tale will stick with you long after you finish reading the book. Highly recommended. ( )

Despite falling prey to the first-novel syndrome of trying to do everything at once, I was quite charmed by this book. Strong, not-always-sympathetic characters, wry looks at several different niches in the Russian immigrant culture, and an appropriately dry sense of humor combine to make an endearing story. ( )

The main character is a (partly) black Jewish girl from Siberia, who's overweight and doesn't fit in. It is the story of how she grows up, gets pregnant, leaves Russia as a mail-order bride and makes a new life in the United States. A very entertaining story. I found the main character to be highly likeable. ( )

http://www.bookpage.com/0702bp/fiction/petropolis.html ( )

A wonderfully realistic picture of Russian immigrants. ( )

http://www.bostonbibliophile.com/2009/01/review-petropolis-by-anya-ulinich.html ( )

Sasha Goldberg's father Victor, leaves her and her mother for America. Their life in Asbestos 2, Siberia is grim. Victor was adopted by an intelletual Jewish couple, the illegitimate child of a Russian and African.
Sasha's 'otherness' makes life complicated in Asbestos 2. When she is 15, she has a baby, and then leaves for America as a mail order bride.
She takes off before her marriage, and goes on a mission to find her father. ( )

I think I lied this book more than I realized after immediately finishing it. Although I wasn't crazy about where the story was heading I always found it enjoyable to read. I think its partly because of the great characters that are so different and well depicted. I really enjoyed this book and would recommend it! ( )

This book was a departure from my regular reading style and I could tell. I was reading it for the Byrant Street Project (NPR) and I tried really I tried. I am not saying that it wasn't well written, it was. I came to the part where she was riding on the bus home from her friends birthday party and was WOW you can do that on a bus!!! I just could not finish it (I will someday). I would look over at it and wince and reprimand myself for not picking it up. I read two other books while trying to finish this one. So I am putting it back up until someone reminds me I should read it again. ( )

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com].)

It's no secret that I'm a fan of novels that use international travel as the core of their story; and one of the reasons I like such books, as is the case with a lot of other fans of the genre, is that it gives a smart author a great opportunity to examine the various cultures that exist around the world, the various sets of societal norms and traditions that exist from place to place and that profoundly make us who we are. What does it say about us, then, when we choose to pack up and move out of the environment in which we grew up, to move halfway across the world into a culture we barely understand? How does that inform you and make you a better citizen of that new place, and how does that clash with the normalization process and make you a worser citizen? And, especially important in the case of those to emigrate to America, can you really make such a move and retain 100 percent of what your "old self" was? Must you take on some of the bad traits that exist about Americans when you choose to live here, when you choose to take advantage of the benefits of being an American?

And pow, out of left field it seems, we have out now one of the better books I've ever read on the subject, the supremely funny and horrifying Petropolis, by Russian-American smartypants immigrant Anya Ulinich. It is not just a detailed look at what most travel novels are about, which is the specific culture our hero is leaving behind (small-town Siberia in this case), but also a laser-precise look at America as well -- from desolate Arizona to the working-class neighborhoods of Chicago, to the Jewish retirement communities of low-rent Brooklyn -- told with a vicious realism that only someone from another country can even see, much less get away with. It will make you laugh uproariously, and it will make you weep uncontrollably; not only a bleak look at what exactly "survival" means to so many people around the world, but also how a person can manage to maintain a sense of fun and awe about the world at the same time. And surprisingly enough, it's more American as well than a lot of books written by native-born Americans; a book full of sophisticated humor concerning the American culture and spirit, jokes that you have to have lived in America your whole life to even get.

More specifically, it's the story of Sasha Goldberg, an overweight, clumsy, black Russian Jew (yeah, I know), living in the rural Siberian city of "Asbestos 2," a leftover shantytown from Russia's Soviet days, which is now becoming a desolate ghost town devoid most times of even electricity and running water. It is one of hundreds of towns and villages in the rural wilds of Russia that most of Russia has forgotten; towns deliberately set up by the Soviet structure during the height of the Industrial Age for specific purposes (with Asbestos 2 being a mining town for...yeah, you guessed it, asbestos), but that are now literally being abandoned by the central government at Moscow in the wake of that country's post-Soviet destabilization. Asbestos 2 is basically a town where everyone left (all couple of dozen of them, that is) are either making plans so they can move, or waiting to die; a place where a teen either gets a scholarship to go to college in a big city, or gets TB with no doctors around and basically keels over at 18 anyway.

This is an odd enough environment, of course, for most spoiled middle-class Americans to get their heads around to begin with, but then Ulinich makes Sasha's situation even stranger than that; her dad is an African war refugee, adopted by a Russian Jewish couple which is how he ended up there, her mom a woman who had been getting groomed to join the Moscow intelligentsia until falling in love with Victor and suddenly consigning herself to a life in Asbestos. As a result, then, Sasha grows up knowing almost nothing about Judaism itself, but with her identity being closely tied to it by her parents to avoid attention to her being the only black kid in town; and this in a city that is rapidly dying, a town so inconsequential that only a handful of streets were even bothered to be named by the old Soviet system that created them.

And really, that's what continues to fuel the storyline propelling Petropolis, as Sasha eventually grows into a teen, indeed leaves to attend art school in Moscow, realizes that she's just no good, and ends up in desperation joining a mail-order-bride service catering to wealthy, creepy Americans; that Sasha tackles all these odd situations and more while still being a frustratingly unique individual, someone who oftentimes reacts in ways that are the opposite of the stereotype, sometimes to her detriment and sometimes to our delight. In fact, the more and more I read of deep character studies like this one, ever since opening CCLaP last June, the more I'm realizing that the key to a good one is whatever flaws the main character possesses -- not the ways they act nobly and good as the story continues, but the ways they act selfish and scared and immature, ways they eventually learn from and become better people because of.

Now, like I said, all this I've been talking about that's been set in Russia is all well and good; but before too long, Sasha has touched down in culture-shock-headquarters Phoenix, the newest bride of the latest sociopath middle manager to take advantage of Kupid's Korner. And this is where the book really starts to shine, to tell you the truth; because it turns out that Ulinich is such an amazing observer of foreign culture (i.e. ours -- she's been here herself since the '90s), she ends up explaining America to us in a much more profound way than even most American writers can. Just watch with fascination as Sasha makes a grand and always-chaotic trek across America -- from the suburban hell and fake lawns of Arizona, to the dumpy low-rises of southwest Chicago, to the Modernist showcases of the North Shore, to the run-down concrete retirement communities of old-skool New York. No matter where she goes, in fact, Sasha seemingly always has fascinating company, from bored Americanized Russian teens to haughty and scared intellectual cerebral-palsy victims, from rebellious half-retarded art-school dropouts to guilt-racked plastic-surgery-obsessed suburban Jewish mothers.

In effect, Ulinich gets something just so incredibly right here in Petropolis, that most international travel stories concerning America don't, which is that the immigrant experience in the US is as large and varied as the US itself; that not every story of moving here has to do with either the red-tape hell of New York or the bandito frontier of illegal Mexicans. As Sasha makes her way from one environment to the next, we see how both the single travelers and immigrant families of the world help shape whatever American destinations they end up at, and how in fact the cultures of a hundred other nations have pervaded America in a deeper way most of us even realize; just witness the informal network seen in Petropolis, for example, that manages to ship Sasha several thousand miles and keep her housed and fed, without her barely having a cent to her name nor any marketable skills.

Perhaps the best compliment I can give Petropolis is this; that I am rapidly reaching the self-imposed word-count limit I keep for myself here at CCLaP (around 1,500 words, that is), and still have lots of stuff that I could talk about and that in fact I wish I could talk about -- of why Sasha tends to fall in love with only the weirdest boys around, of the complex neurosis that exists in Sasha's mom by being raised a self-styled intellectual, of the surprising similarities between the small-town peasant Siberia and the small-town redneck Midwest. It's one of those books with untold pleasures that keep unfolding and unfolding; a book with yet another witty observation or language-based joke or ironic hipster Soviet reference around every corner, barely before you've had time to enjoy the last one. It was a real treat, a definite high point of 2008 that's come so early in the year; it's a book I definitely recommend to anyone interested in international travel, or in understanding America in a better way than they did before.

Out of 10:
Story: 9.9
Characters: 9.5
Style: 9.7
Overall: 9.6, or 10 for fans of international travel stories

P.S. For an extra special treat, make sure to stop by the official website [AnyaUlinich.com] to see actual home photos from Ulinich's real '80s Soviet youth, something that will help you envision the first third of this novel more quickly than anything else. ( )