Valentina behaves appallingly, but she’s humanized by the revealing detail of a blister she has ignored for a year. And brash Valentina, so fearful about the girls’ disappearance that she clamps down on her own daughter, forbidding her to see her best friend. There’s Oksana, who ends a long friendship when her distracted pals lose her dog. It takes a while to vibe with these resets, especially since about half of the people have names that begin with the letter “A,” but “Earth” spirits us along because each new set of characters turns out to be so compelling. Phillips makes Kamchatka seem ordinary in the way people go about their lives but otherworldly in its residents’ calm acceptance of tragedy (one chilling plot point is the years-earlier disappearance of another girl, who is considered a runaway despite evidence to the contrary).Įach story in “Earth” introduces a new plot and characters, one of whom always turns out to be investigating the sisters’ disappearance, or related to the missing girls or obsessed by a theory about what became of them. On the eastern edge of Russia, closer to Alaska and Japan than to the rest of Europe, it’s described as almost like an island because a mountain range and an active volcano isolate it from the rest of Russia. It’s on the peninsula of Kamchatka, which seems to be an easy place to vanish. Phillips’ bleak depiction of that Russian city sets the stage for her riveting debut. From talking to him to accepting a ride, the sisters make a series of bad decisions that reverberate throughout the town of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky.
Stretching from August to the following July, the book’s opener fills you with dread the minute sisters Sophia and Alyona spot a man on the deserted beach where they’re playing. The individual stories are sharp portraits that add up to something deeply rewarding. Often, they’re satisfying neither as novels nor as story collections, but Julia Phillips’ debut, “Disappearing Earth,” is an exception.
Like low-fat ice cream, linked-story novels are an invitation to disappointment.
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