Review of Disappearing Earth, by Julia Phillips

Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Set in Russia, on the Kamchatka Peninsula, this powerful novel circles around the disappearance of two young girls from the peninsula’s only city, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. As the novel opens, we see the girls playing by the sea, as the older girl Alyona tells her sister a legend about a town that disappears into the sea following a quake. The legend sets the tone for the rest of the novel, as the sisters also vanish. Each chapter is told from the viewpoint of a different person—all women—we learn of lives lived in hope and loss; of women who dream of escape, but are sucked back into what they already have. In the telling, Phillips drops breadcrumbs that lead us ultimately to the fate of the two sisters. One of the last chapters allows us into the head of the lost girls’ mother, a viewpoint that is gut-wrenchingly difficult to read. There are other losses in the book: one woman has lost her beloved dog, another a teenage daughter who supposedly ran away from home, others a best friend or a husband. The reader feels the intensity of their pain. The interlocking stories gradually build up a picture of this remote part of Russia, the people who live there, and the tensions between them: the Russians and the indigenous people like the Even, many from the remote villages to the north, accessed by bad roads. Some of the most striking scenes are descriptions of traditional reindeer herding in the tundra: “The blue-lit black of nights. The limitless dry yellow of days…the daily moving of camp, on horseback, again, making their way along the thousand-kilometer loop of trails that took the herd a year to cover” (82). Phillips also evokes the overpowering closeness of parents and children, their mutual vulnerability: “Mila wrapped her arms around Nadia’s neck and leaned into her lap. The girl smelled soupy: dill, black pepper, lemon juice. Nadia hugged her tighter” (154). With evocative prose, an exotic location, and a strong dose of human emotions, this novel pulled me in from the first page.



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