DISAPPEARING EARTH

Narrator Ilyana Kadushin skillfully meets the challenges of this genre-bending audiobook. Set in modern-day Kamchatka, the story revolves around the disappearance of two young sisters and is told through the eyes of different women or girls whose lives have been variously affected by the kidnappings. Kadushin modulates her tone to fit each woman's age and circumstances, highlighting, for example, a young dancer's tentative disloyalty to her controlling boyfriend, a teen's dismay over losing a friend, and a potential witness's uncertainty about what she saw. These vignettes evoke details of life on the northern Russian peninsula, particularly emphasizing gender, cultural, socioeconomic, and generational divides. Kadushin's pronunciations of the non-English words enhance the setting, and her delivery of the dialogue flows at a natural tempo. C.B.L. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine [Published: JUNE 2019]