What do you think?
Rate this book
The Half Life of Valery K
From the author of The Watchmaker of Filigree Street and The Kingdoms, an epic Cold War novel set in a mysterious town in Soviet Russia.
In 1963, in a Siberian gulag, former nuclear specialist Valery Kolkhanov has mastered what it takes to survive: the right connections to the guards for access to food and cigarettes, the right pair of warm boots to avoid frostbite, and the right attitude toward the small pleasures of life so he won’t go insane. But on one ordinary day, all that changes: Valery’s university mentor steps in and sweeps Valery from the frozen prison camp to a mysterious unnamed town that houses a set of nuclear reactors and is surrounded by a forest so damaged it looks like the trees have rusted from within.
In City 40, Valery is Dr. Kolkhanov once more, and he’s expected to serve out his prison term studying the effect of radiation on local animals. But as Valery begins his work, he is struck by the questions his research raises: why is there so much radiation in this area? What, exactly, is being hidden from the thousands who live in the town? And if he keeps looking for answers, will he live to serve out his sentence?
Based on real events in a surreal Soviet city, and told with bestselling author Natasha Pulley’s inimitable style, The Half Life of Valery K is a sweeping new adventure for readers of Stuart Turton and Sarah Gailey.
In 1963, in a Siberian gulag, former nuclear specialist Valery Kolkhanov has mastered what it takes to survive: the right connections to the guards for access to food and cigarettes, the right pair of warm boots to avoid frostbite, and the right attitude toward the small pleasures of life so he won’t go insane. But on one ordinary day, all that changes: Valery’s university mentor steps in and sweeps Valery from the frozen prison camp to a mysterious unnamed town that houses a set of nuclear reactors and is surrounded by a forest so damaged it looks like the trees have rusted from within.
In City 40, Valery is Dr. Kolkhanov once more, and he’s expected to serve out his prison term studying the effect of radiation on local animals. But as Valery begins his work, he is struck by the questions his research raises: why is there so much radiation in this area? What, exactly, is being hidden from the thousands who live in the town? And if he keeps looking for answers, will he live to serve out his sentence?
Based on real events in a surreal Soviet city, and told with bestselling author Natasha Pulley’s inimitable style, The Half Life of Valery K is a sweeping new adventure for readers of Stuart Turton and Sarah Gailey.
375 pages, Hardcover
First published June 23, 2022
208 people are currently reading
13966 people want to read
About the author
Natasha Pulley
14 books2,952 followersNatasha Pulley is the author of The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, The Bedlam Stacks, and quite a lot more. An international bestseller, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street won a Betty Trask Award and was shortlisted for the Author’s Club Best First Novel Award, the Locus Awards, and remained on the Sunday Times bestseller list for much of summer 2016. The Bedlam Stacks was longlisted for the Walter Scott Award and shortlisted for the Encore Award.
Natasha has lived in Japan as a Daiwa Scholar, as well as China and Peru. She was a 2016 Gladstone Writer in Residence, and she teaches Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, alongside short courses at the Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education. She has also taught various courses for the Arvon Foundation and is always happy to be contacted about other residential teaching too.
Natasha has lived in Japan as a Daiwa Scholar, as well as China and Peru. She was a 2016 Gladstone Writer in Residence, and she teaches Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, alongside short courses at the Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education. She has also taught various courses for the Arvon Foundation and is always happy to be contacted about other residential teaching too.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,123 reviews
August 23, 2022
Valery is a soviet prisoner who has been released from the gulag and placed in “city 40” to serve out the remainder of his sentence as a scientist. It’s 1963.
An odd city name, but more suspicious is the dead forest he has driven through. His specialization is in radiation. But much of his empirical data is driven by his moral compass which keeps him dangerously close to voicing his concerns. Which would mean death. Thousands of people who live there are unaware of the extreme amounts of radiation they are exposed to. The Russian motto: see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil or there will be deathly consequences. Paranoia. Those who turn against the Soviet regime are kidnapped for further scientific exposure.
An intimate friendship develops between Valery and a KGB officer, Shenkov, which becomes his lifeline. Great characters; an abundance of info on radiation - AND - Albert, the octopus.
The realism of this story is what is most disturbing. A threatened nuclear war and what Russia is willing to put their own people through to study the effects and uphold the illusion to the rest of the world they are the most powerful; even at the costs of their own human casualties.
Much of this story is true. Scientists kidnapped. This city does exist. And the radiation spiked again in 2018. Tick Tock.
An odd city name, but more suspicious is the dead forest he has driven through. His specialization is in radiation. But much of his empirical data is driven by his moral compass which keeps him dangerously close to voicing his concerns. Which would mean death. Thousands of people who live there are unaware of the extreme amounts of radiation they are exposed to. The Russian motto: see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil or there will be deathly consequences. Paranoia. Those who turn against the Soviet regime are kidnapped for further scientific exposure.
An intimate friendship develops between Valery and a KGB officer, Shenkov, which becomes his lifeline. Great characters; an abundance of info on radiation - AND - Albert, the octopus.
The realism of this story is what is most disturbing. A threatened nuclear war and what Russia is willing to put their own people through to study the effects and uphold the illusion to the rest of the world they are the most powerful; even at the costs of their own human casualties.
Much of this story is true. Scientists kidnapped. This city does exist. And the radiation spiked again in 2018. Tick Tock.
December 7, 2022
i think pulley tricked me into attending a chemistry lesson.
i- HOWLS
✼ thank you to bloomsbury for sending me an arc of the half life of valery k in exchange for an honest review
natasha pulley has such a solid grip on my stupid mortal being i no longer know what to do with myself. i asked how to sell my soul for an advanced copy of one of my most anticipated reads, and was blessed with one a few days later.
(make what you will of that)
it’s 1963. former nuclear specialist valery kolkhanov gets swept from a frozen prison camp to city 40, a mysterious town hiding a set of nuclear reactors & a forest rusted from within. his task? serve out the rest of his prison term researching the effect of radiation on local fauna. but as he digs deeper, something doesn’t add up - the radiation levels aren’t right and there are secrets taken to the grave.
valery k differs from pulley’s other books, in that there’s no magical realism, no event spanning time or defying physics. just two people caught in the eye of a political storm that could tear them apart, the subterfuge, the trauma. the way it carries itself in iron chains around their necks even as they seek comfort. an intimate tragedy.
and yet, this is unmistakably pulley. what can i say about pulley that i haven’t said before?
how there’s a method to the madness; a formula perfected so finely that it never fails to leave me breathless and reeling. the way she weaves each story like literal magic - take what you know from the history books but make it queer and infuse it with sad, tragic, frayed men. so desperately lonely but with a heart of fire.
how she doesn’t write romance per se, but writes about love. in the past, it’s the relentless waiting, the red thread that spans through time and history, an intimate unspoken understanding, an elbow touch.
here, its kindness in a world so harrowing and bleak, safety in a place that isn’t, the choice of kindness when cruelty is easier, the arms around you when your lungs don’t work, the warm touch that tries to ease away embedded shards under skin. and as always, an inexplicable pull.
how she writes in a way where even the simplest sentences feel like a gut punch? an electric shock. so raw and yet so beautiful. how i want to gnaw on my knuckles while reading them and how she leaves me aching for a place that i don’t even know.
how its only april, but i already know this book will make an appearance on my top 10 countdown in december. i am so, so utterly in love.
anyway dare i...put this on the faves shelf immediately...?
cw: human mutations (mild body horror), human experimentation, animal experimentation and deformation, panic attacks, torture (implied)
___
hey siri how do you sell your soul for an advanced copy of a book
“if i look sad, it’s because this is the happiest i’ve been for years, and you did that, but you aren’t even one tenth mine and you never will be.”
i- HOWLS
✼ thank you to bloomsbury for sending me an arc of the half life of valery k in exchange for an honest review
natasha pulley has such a solid grip on my stupid mortal being i no longer know what to do with myself. i asked how to sell my soul for an advanced copy of one of my most anticipated reads, and was blessed with one a few days later.
(make what you will of that)
it’s 1963. former nuclear specialist valery kolkhanov gets swept from a frozen prison camp to city 40, a mysterious town hiding a set of nuclear reactors & a forest rusted from within. his task? serve out the rest of his prison term researching the effect of radiation on local fauna. but as he digs deeper, something doesn’t add up - the radiation levels aren’t right and there are secrets taken to the grave.
valery k differs from pulley’s other books, in that there’s no magical realism, no event spanning time or defying physics. just two people caught in the eye of a political storm that could tear them apart, the subterfuge, the trauma. the way it carries itself in iron chains around their necks even as they seek comfort. an intimate tragedy.
and yet, this is unmistakably pulley. what can i say about pulley that i haven’t said before?
how there’s a method to the madness; a formula perfected so finely that it never fails to leave me breathless and reeling. the way she weaves each story like literal magic - take what you know from the history books but make it queer and infuse it with sad, tragic, frayed men. so desperately lonely but with a heart of fire.
how she doesn’t write romance per se, but writes about love. in the past, it’s the relentless waiting, the red thread that spans through time and history, an intimate unspoken understanding, an elbow touch.
here, its kindness in a world so harrowing and bleak, safety in a place that isn’t, the choice of kindness when cruelty is easier, the arms around you when your lungs don’t work, the warm touch that tries to ease away embedded shards under skin. and as always, an inexplicable pull.
how she writes in a way where even the simplest sentences feel like a gut punch? an electric shock. so raw and yet so beautiful. how i want to gnaw on my knuckles while reading them and how she leaves me aching for a place that i don’t even know.
how its only april, but i already know this book will make an appearance on my top 10 countdown in december. i am so, so utterly in love.
anyway dare i...put this on the faves shelf immediately...?
cw: human mutations (mild body horror), human experimentation, animal experimentation and deformation, panic attacks, torture (implied)
___
hey siri how do you sell your soul for an advanced copy of a book
July 29, 2022
EDIT: Oh my god this book is finally out so I can talk shit about it! I read this months ago and still remember everything I despised with visceral clarity so here’s my rant. Major spoilers and TW for rape, war crimes, Nazi human experimentation.
Natasha Pulley’s whole thing is like M/M interracial romances in exotic (to a white British woman) locales, usually with a very plot-heavy timey wimey/conspiracy/adventure element which is very fun! Except each book also features her bizarre internal battle with signalling she is a feminist who thinks British colonialism is bad…….all while brutally killing off every woman that gets in the way of said romance, and also having a strange nationalist element (e.g. France winning the Napoleonic Wars leads to a despotic future where white slavery exists and the poor English people having to reinstate the good future where…..normal slavery exists). This never bothered me that much in the past because, whatever, I don’t take her seriously and I loved derangement but THIS book was beyond the pale and it didn’t even have the grace to be enjoyable!!
So the plot is about Gulag prisoner/nuclear scientist Valery who is released from prison to serve out the rest of his sentence in a remote Russian town where him and a bunch of other scientists are studying the effects of radiation poisoning. The shady government is obviously lying to everyone about the levels of poison in the soil, fucked up mutations are springing up and Valery is like “HELLO something is going on!” The scientists and administration are predictably cryptic and shady about his worries. I won’t even bother going into the overarching story because it’s basically a very derivative Cold War thriller where every conspiracy beat is so thudding and obvious. But I WILL say that City 40 is in fact a real town in real life (which Pulley reminds us in an incredibly self-righteous note at the end) and the suffering showcased is completely real……..which is certainly a choice considering she doesn’t explore the topic in any depth whatsoever and the crux of the plot is actually about Valery falling in love with A SEXY KGB AGENT DUDE????? WHO LITERALLY REGULARLY EXECUTES DISSENTERS INCLUDING, CONVENIENTLY, A WOMAN VALERY HAS A CRUSH ON????
At this point I was like okay this book is crazy but I will gladly read a toxic romance book (sue me) but to my surprise this relationship has absolutely zero spice — it’s shocking the amount of woobifying and babying that Pulley does to justify the actions of these 40+ year old men. She repeatedly emphasises that Sexy KGB Man (can’t remember his name but he’s Central Asian btw, and characters comment on his Asianness even tho RUSSIA AND CHINA LITERALLY SHARE A BORDER) can’t help his actions! He’s in a difficult spot and feels bad about it! At one point it’s revealed that Valery himself worked under JOSEF MENGELE THE NAZI RACE SCIENTIST but Sexy KGB Man is like “You can’t be blamed for your Nazi human experimentation! You were only 19 and worked there for, like, 2 months. Much like how I can’t be blamed for burning down a village because the situation would have been much worse if an immoral KGB agent was in my position!” WHAT?????
I am a strong believer characters should be allowed to be fucked up and morally repugnant but I’m also like………..is Pulley expecting her readers to be actually invested in these Austen-esque weepy scenes between these two men who spend all their time feeling sorry for themselves for committing atrocities and never have an iota of tension with each other over their actions? How incredibly boring? I’d rather read about two people are intentionally written to be insane and delusional and struggling to trust each other — which is what I thought I was getting!
Also Pulley has this trend in her books where all her female characters are unemotional, ruthless, often despicable girlbosses because defying gender norms I guess, and this sometimes results in interesting characters (like the antagonist of this book, a shady scientist lady who is the only compelling character). But then she does this thing where she will violently bulldoze every single one of these women because they get in the way of the gay couple. The girl Valery had a crush on? Shot in the head by Sexy KGB Man! Sexy KGB Man’s wife? She has terminal cancer after being forced to work in the radiation-poisoned town by her husband’s predicament! Evil scientist lady? She meets a violent end too, but this I’m less mad about because at least she injected some menace into this stale ass book. OH and there’s also an entire train carriage of women who get raped to death in front of Valery, for the purposes of making Valery grow a spine (it’s literally so he has something heroic to do i.e. take revenge on the rapists by murdering them all, in an attempt to make the audience sympathise with him more. Reader, I did not like him more.)
Another Pulley trend is that she “localises” all the dialogue so that everyone sounds British. This was really funny in her Watchmaker books where all the Japanese characters speak in English slang but it made more sense because the primary character is English, so I was like okay she wanted to maintain some kind of consistency. But here EVERYONE IS RUSSIAN and they’re saying shit like “bollocks” and “chap”?????? It makes me wonder who this book is localised for (rhetorical statement) and why she is obsessed with depicting other cultures when she puts zero effort into researching the behaviours, slang and specificity of said cultures.
Nobody in the world talks like British people! It ruins any kind of suspension of disbelief you may have that this book is actually set in Russia as soon as they say BOLLOCKS. Also, back to her weird nationalist streak, the gays are eventually rescued by the British embassy and get relocated to England LMAO. Where, very quickly, Pulley becomes insecure about this narrative choice and Valery launches into an insane rant about how English women are so docile and uncool compared to Russian girlbosses and his neighbour probably beats his wife.
THAT’S LITERALLY HOW THE BOOK ENDS!!!!!!!!! With every cool Russian woman dead or dying, and Valery going on a rant about how English women are probably all being abused by their husbands like…….what are we meant to take away from this, girl. The fact I am pondering over what on earth anyone is meant to take away from this book months later is a sign that the problem is me, for continuing to read these unhinged books 😭
——
original:
Absolutely deranged book. More thoughts later
Natasha Pulley’s whole thing is like M/M interracial romances in exotic (to a white British woman) locales, usually with a very plot-heavy timey wimey/conspiracy/adventure element which is very fun! Except each book also features her bizarre internal battle with signalling she is a feminist who thinks British colonialism is bad…….all while brutally killing off every woman that gets in the way of said romance, and also having a strange nationalist element (e.g. France winning the Napoleonic Wars leads to a despotic future where white slavery exists and the poor English people having to reinstate the good future where…..normal slavery exists). This never bothered me that much in the past because, whatever, I don’t take her seriously and I loved derangement but THIS book was beyond the pale and it didn’t even have the grace to be enjoyable!!
So the plot is about Gulag prisoner/nuclear scientist Valery who is released from prison to serve out the rest of his sentence in a remote Russian town where him and a bunch of other scientists are studying the effects of radiation poisoning. The shady government is obviously lying to everyone about the levels of poison in the soil, fucked up mutations are springing up and Valery is like “HELLO something is going on!” The scientists and administration are predictably cryptic and shady about his worries. I won’t even bother going into the overarching story because it’s basically a very derivative Cold War thriller where every conspiracy beat is so thudding and obvious. But I WILL say that City 40 is in fact a real town in real life (which Pulley reminds us in an incredibly self-righteous note at the end) and the suffering showcased is completely real……..which is certainly a choice considering she doesn’t explore the topic in any depth whatsoever and the crux of the plot is actually about Valery falling in love with A SEXY KGB AGENT DUDE????? WHO LITERALLY REGULARLY EXECUTES DISSENTERS INCLUDING, CONVENIENTLY, A WOMAN VALERY HAS A CRUSH ON????
At this point I was like okay this book is crazy but I will gladly read a toxic romance book (sue me) but to my surprise this relationship has absolutely zero spice — it’s shocking the amount of woobifying and babying that Pulley does to justify the actions of these 40+ year old men. She repeatedly emphasises that Sexy KGB Man (can’t remember his name but he’s Central Asian btw, and characters comment on his Asianness even tho RUSSIA AND CHINA LITERALLY SHARE A BORDER) can’t help his actions! He’s in a difficult spot and feels bad about it! At one point it’s revealed that Valery himself worked under JOSEF MENGELE THE NAZI RACE SCIENTIST but Sexy KGB Man is like “You can’t be blamed for your Nazi human experimentation! You were only 19 and worked there for, like, 2 months. Much like how I can’t be blamed for burning down a village because the situation would have been much worse if an immoral KGB agent was in my position!” WHAT?????
I am a strong believer characters should be allowed to be fucked up and morally repugnant but I’m also like………..is Pulley expecting her readers to be actually invested in these Austen-esque weepy scenes between these two men who spend all their time feeling sorry for themselves for committing atrocities and never have an iota of tension with each other over their actions? How incredibly boring? I’d rather read about two people are intentionally written to be insane and delusional and struggling to trust each other — which is what I thought I was getting!
Also Pulley has this trend in her books where all her female characters are unemotional, ruthless, often despicable girlbosses because defying gender norms I guess, and this sometimes results in interesting characters (like the antagonist of this book, a shady scientist lady who is the only compelling character). But then she does this thing where she will violently bulldoze every single one of these women because they get in the way of the gay couple. The girl Valery had a crush on? Shot in the head by Sexy KGB Man! Sexy KGB Man’s wife? She has terminal cancer after being forced to work in the radiation-poisoned town by her husband’s predicament! Evil scientist lady? She meets a violent end too, but this I’m less mad about because at least she injected some menace into this stale ass book. OH and there’s also an entire train carriage of women who get raped to death in front of Valery, for the purposes of making Valery grow a spine (it’s literally so he has something heroic to do i.e. take revenge on the rapists by murdering them all, in an attempt to make the audience sympathise with him more. Reader, I did not like him more.)
Another Pulley trend is that she “localises” all the dialogue so that everyone sounds British. This was really funny in her Watchmaker books where all the Japanese characters speak in English slang but it made more sense because the primary character is English, so I was like okay she wanted to maintain some kind of consistency. But here EVERYONE IS RUSSIAN and they’re saying shit like “bollocks” and “chap”?????? It makes me wonder who this book is localised for (rhetorical statement) and why she is obsessed with depicting other cultures when she puts zero effort into researching the behaviours, slang and specificity of said cultures.
Nobody in the world talks like British people! It ruins any kind of suspension of disbelief you may have that this book is actually set in Russia as soon as they say BOLLOCKS. Also, back to her weird nationalist streak, the gays are eventually rescued by the British embassy and get relocated to England LMAO. Where, very quickly, Pulley becomes insecure about this narrative choice and Valery launches into an insane rant about how English women are so docile and uncool compared to Russian girlbosses and his neighbour probably beats his wife.
THAT’S LITERALLY HOW THE BOOK ENDS!!!!!!!!! With every cool Russian woman dead or dying, and Valery going on a rant about how English women are probably all being abused by their husbands like…….what are we meant to take away from this, girl. The fact I am pondering over what on earth anyone is meant to take away from this book months later is a sign that the problem is me, for continuing to read these unhinged books 😭
——
original:
Absolutely deranged book. More thoughts later
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 5, 2023
Setting aside her usual magical realism, Natasha Pulley tries her hand at straight-up historical fiction with The Half Life of Valery K, a novel set in Soviet Russia during the time of the Cold War.
The year is 1963, and Dr. Valery Kolkhanov, a nuclear scientist, is moved from his frozen Siberian prison to City 40. There he’s expected to serve out the remainder of his prison term by studying radiation and its effect on the local wildlife. But instead of finding answers to his research questions, Valery discovers a very large amount of radiation in the area and is determined to uncover the source of it.
Pulley indicates in her afterword that much of what happens in the novel is based on true events, though Valery and his comrades are fictional. This aura of realism casts the story in a frightening light, particularly with the current war in Ukraine. To think of what could’ve happened years ago or of what might yet happen – it’s scary times we live in.
As for the novel, it’s very good. I adored Valery and was very invested in his plight. Pulley has an easy way of storytelling – her prose flows nicely and the plot is compelling. She even manages to make the science in the novel interesting and understandable.
What I noticed, though – Pulley couldn’t keep her Britishness out of her writing. Not all the characters read Russian to me, especially Valery, and I found it distracting because I had to remind myself over and over that he was Russian. It may be that the vernacular is a little off; perhaps too many Britishisms are in the dialogue. Whatever the reason, Valery and a few of the others needed something to root them into the setting.
This doesn’t, however, change the fact that Valery K is a terrific read. And if you do read it, pay special attention to the ending. Pulley slips a twist in that’s difficult to spot, one that will make you sit up and think, Wait! What?
The year is 1963, and Dr. Valery Kolkhanov, a nuclear scientist, is moved from his frozen Siberian prison to City 40. There he’s expected to serve out the remainder of his prison term by studying radiation and its effect on the local wildlife. But instead of finding answers to his research questions, Valery discovers a very large amount of radiation in the area and is determined to uncover the source of it.
Pulley indicates in her afterword that much of what happens in the novel is based on true events, though Valery and his comrades are fictional. This aura of realism casts the story in a frightening light, particularly with the current war in Ukraine. To think of what could’ve happened years ago or of what might yet happen – it’s scary times we live in.
As for the novel, it’s very good. I adored Valery and was very invested in his plight. Pulley has an easy way of storytelling – her prose flows nicely and the plot is compelling. She even manages to make the science in the novel interesting and understandable.
What I noticed, though – Pulley couldn’t keep her Britishness out of her writing. Not all the characters read Russian to me, especially Valery, and I found it distracting because I had to remind myself over and over that he was Russian. It may be that the vernacular is a little off; perhaps too many Britishisms are in the dialogue. Whatever the reason, Valery and a few of the others needed something to root them into the setting.
This doesn’t, however, change the fact that Valery K is a terrific read. And if you do read it, pay special attention to the ending. Pulley slips a twist in that’s difficult to spot, one that will make you sit up and think, Wait! What?
July 22, 2023
rep: Russian cast, gay mc with ptsd, achillean li
tw: murder (off-page), medical experiments on humans, cancer, animal death, implied torture, panic attacks
natasha did it again. a mystery book with a ridiculous setting which is actually a romance book that punches u straight in the heart
but also, it's a very weird experience to read sth based in soviet russia when ur a slav. there are all those scenes clearly written to be shocking, but their punch-lines have been glaringly obvious to u from pages before. all the brutality portrayed here, which is supposed to make the stakes super high, just feels... well, it's not shocking, despite natasha's efforts. it's way more lenient than everything u already know from ur history lessons in elementary school. there's this weird disconnect between what i know the author wanted me to feel & what i actually feel, bc none of this is new. i can tell she did some research, but it just all seems so weak and somehow still not researched.
plus the very idea of pairing a Gulag prisoner & a KGB agent? and the Gulag prisoner working in his youth on literal human experiments run by nazis? pulley did handle it with as much grace as she could i guess, but uhh... that is a Choice!
anyway that scene with a married couple at the end? the fuck was that? pulley, we know you hate women & can't write them for the life of you but come on.
(and i just can't get over the fact pulley thinks a russian man of shenkov's size would get drunk on like half a bottle of vodka. that's hilarious)
tw: murder (off-page), medical experiments on humans, cancer, animal death, implied torture, panic attacks
natasha did it again. a mystery book with a ridiculous setting which is actually a romance book that punches u straight in the heart
but also, it's a very weird experience to read sth based in soviet russia when ur a slav. there are all those scenes clearly written to be shocking, but their punch-lines have been glaringly obvious to u from pages before. all the brutality portrayed here, which is supposed to make the stakes super high, just feels... well, it's not shocking, despite natasha's efforts. it's way more lenient than everything u already know from ur history lessons in elementary school. there's this weird disconnect between what i know the author wanted me to feel & what i actually feel, bc none of this is new. i can tell she did some research, but it just all seems so weak and somehow still not researched.
plus the very idea of pairing a Gulag prisoner & a KGB agent? and the Gulag prisoner working in his youth on literal human experiments run by nazis? pulley did handle it with as much grace as she could i guess, but uhh... that is a Choice!
anyway that scene with a married couple at the end? the fuck was that? pulley, we know you hate women & can't write them for the life of you but come on.
(and i just can't get over the fact pulley thinks a russian man of shenkov's size would get drunk on like half a bottle of vodka. that's hilarious)
July 22, 2022
"I keep hearing all this about radiation, but frankly, comrade, if I can't see it and it doesn't bite, I'm not that worried."
In 1963, scientist Valery Kolkhanov is taken from a Siberian gulag, and transported to a bustling, lively town located just outside what appears to be the site of a devastating nuclear accident. There he is expected to serve out his sentence testing field mice for radiation exposure. His findings reveal some pretty horrific information, but his attempts to report what he's learned are met with indifference and denial, even by his closest colleagues.
Politics and science are incompatible fields.
What can you do when a government refuses to hear bad news abouta deadly pandemic, climate change, a possible accident that will endanger the lives of millions, and instead prefers to broadcast lies and misinformation?
Yeah.
What can you do?
Pulley's novel is loosely based on a real incident, and it's a nerve-wracking, disturbing read. No matter where you live, you will recognize the inept government officials portrayed by the author, individuals looking out only for the bottom line, who couldn't care less about the well being of others as long as they get to continue making money. Sorry if I sound bitter, but shit never changes does it?
The man sounded like he had been lying so fluently for so long that the truth was beginning to slip his mind.
If this one doesn't angry up your blood, you probably don't have a pulse.
In 1963, scientist Valery Kolkhanov is taken from a Siberian gulag, and transported to a bustling, lively town located just outside what appears to be the site of a devastating nuclear accident. There he is expected to serve out his sentence testing field mice for radiation exposure. His findings reveal some pretty horrific information, but his attempts to report what he's learned are met with indifference and denial, even by his closest colleagues.
Politics and science are incompatible fields.
What can you do when a government refuses to hear bad news about
Yeah.
What can you do?
Pulley's novel is loosely based on a real incident, and it's a nerve-wracking, disturbing read. No matter where you live, you will recognize the inept government officials portrayed by the author, individuals looking out only for the bottom line, who couldn't care less about the well being of others as long as they get to continue making money. Sorry if I sound bitter, but shit never changes does it?
The man sounded like he had been lying so fluently for so long that the truth was beginning to slip his mind.
If this one doesn't angry up your blood, you probably don't have a pulse.
November 13, 2022
I know this novel by Ms Pulley is not her typical work, no magical realism in it, but for me it was a book that offered terror and a feeling of helplessness through most realistic descriptions of the imaginary place and people that could have destroyed most of my world too. This is a piece of fiction but based on some real places and activities and the danger is still looming ...
Now I am ready for Ms Pulley's other novels!
Now I am ready for Ms Pulley's other novels!
September 28, 2023
On my blog.
Rep: gay mc with PTSD, Soviet Central Asian achillean li
CWs: animal death, implied torture, panic attacks
Galley provided by publisher
The Half Life of Valery K is an odd book because, on finishing it, I was full of the usual Pulley-related feelings. And then I thought about it more.
It’s one of those awkward ones where I did still like the book, but it has parts which I disliked on a spectrum ranging from slightly to intensely. And I never thought this would be something I’d say about a Natasha Pulley book, but here we are.
The Good
Pulley’s writing. This is an obvious place to start because, as ever, the writing in this book was brilliant. It sucks you in, in a quietly magical way. You can see yourself standing in the snow alongside Valery and Shenkov. On strength of writing, I’d say Natasha Pulley is one of the best authors around at the moment.
The characters. The characters are part of the writing too, really, because it’s that writing that brings them to life. Every one of them is vibrant and full of life, they jump off the page and you can’t help but root for them, to want them all to live. Valery and Shenkov were, of course, the most prominent, but Anna is also well fleshed out (possibly more so than most of Pulley’s other women characters… woops. I’ll come to this in a moment).
The mystery. Okay, so it wasn’t a hugely mysterious mystery by about the halfway point, so really this book was slightly more like a thriller. A slow-paced thriller, to be sure, but pretty thrilling nonetheless. It even had me questioning, at points, whether Valery and Shenkov would make it out okay.
The Bad/Less Good/Slightly Awkward
Equating gendered terms of address with calling someone “penis”. I am as confused as you are. This was an entirely nonsensical and pointless conversation in the book—not least because these are all characters for whom gendered terms of address is something entirely normal (and probably not escaped by using “comrade” because, guess what, that’s only not gendered in English because English mostly lacks gendered nouns!). This was the quote:
Equating “mister” with “penis” seems quite ciscentric to me and that’s the absolute kindest interpretation I can think of (feel free to imagine the less kind ones). The other is that this is somehow some clumsy way of saying Valery doesn’t identify as a Man, but I think that might be giving a bit much credit.
The gulag. Natasha Pulley’s writing doesn’t lend itself to brutality. Yes, The Kingdoms was, at times, pretty harsh, but it was told in such a way that you were somewhat removed from it. You could see the harshness, but at a distance. And that worked, for The Kingdoms. It does not work here. Because Valery is supposedly sent to the gulag—and this is where he’s spent a good few years at the start of the book—but it feels somewhat played down, to say the least. It feels like “oh the gulag wasn’t so bad actually”.
Misogyny. Five Natasha Pulley books in and there’s a pattern emerging: for every gay couple there is, a woman is shafted and/or presented as despicable. Think Grace in Watchmaker (nasty), Pepperharrow in Pepperharrow (shafted), Agatha in The Kingdoms (nasty, shafted), and Mina in Bedlam Stacks (shafted, but at least still living). They all have a similar character type and they are all there to prevent the main couple from getting together. Please also note that they are, more often than not, the sole, and at all vaguely prominent, female character in the book. Frankly, at some point, you have to wonder about Pulley’s internalised misogyny. For reasons which I will elaborate on in the next point, I think Anna in this one is shafted more than most. She is presented as an ambitious scientist, but one who has no real motherly feelings, despite the four children she and Shenkov have produced. She’s cold, but nice enough. And, for a lot of the book, I thought she might prove me wrong about Pulley and misogyny. Then, the ending.
The ending. Skip this paragraph if you don’t want spoilers because boy will there be spoilers here.
So, while I gave this book 5 stars initially, I think in retrospect, it doesn’t merit that. I enjoyed it still, yes, but there were so many issues I had with it by the end, that it’s hard to convince myself it deserved those 5 stars. It was, overall, a little disappointing.
Rep: gay mc with PTSD, Soviet Central Asian achillean li
CWs: animal death, implied torture, panic attacks
Galley provided by publisher
The Half Life of Valery K is an odd book because, on finishing it, I was full of the usual Pulley-related feelings. And then I thought about it more.
It’s one of those awkward ones where I did still like the book, but it has parts which I disliked on a spectrum ranging from slightly to intensely. And I never thought this would be something I’d say about a Natasha Pulley book, but here we are.
The Good
Pulley’s writing. This is an obvious place to start because, as ever, the writing in this book was brilliant. It sucks you in, in a quietly magical way. You can see yourself standing in the snow alongside Valery and Shenkov. On strength of writing, I’d say Natasha Pulley is one of the best authors around at the moment.
The characters. The characters are part of the writing too, really, because it’s that writing that brings them to life. Every one of them is vibrant and full of life, they jump off the page and you can’t help but root for them, to want them all to live. Valery and Shenkov were, of course, the most prominent, but Anna is also well fleshed out (possibly more so than most of Pulley’s other women characters… woops. I’ll come to this in a moment).
The mystery. Okay, so it wasn’t a hugely mysterious mystery by about the halfway point, so really this book was slightly more like a thriller. A slow-paced thriller, to be sure, but pretty thrilling nonetheless. It even had me questioning, at points, whether Valery and Shenkov would make it out okay.
The Bad/Less Good/Slightly Awkward
Equating gendered terms of address with calling someone “penis”. I am as confused as you are. This was an entirely nonsensical and pointless conversation in the book—not least because these are all characters for whom gendered terms of address is something entirely normal (and probably not escaped by using “comrade” because, guess what, that’s only not gendered in English because English mostly lacks gendered nouns!). This was the quote:
“every single person reminded every single time they were named of that one part of them that defined everything they were meant to be, and nobody ever seemed to sit back and say, but we would never call anyone Penis Harrison; how’s mister any different?”
Equating “mister” with “penis” seems quite ciscentric to me and that’s the absolute kindest interpretation I can think of (feel free to imagine the less kind ones). The other is that this is somehow some clumsy way of saying Valery doesn’t identify as a Man, but I think that might be giving a bit much credit.
The gulag. Natasha Pulley’s writing doesn’t lend itself to brutality. Yes, The Kingdoms was, at times, pretty harsh, but it was told in such a way that you were somewhat removed from it. You could see the harshness, but at a distance. And that worked, for The Kingdoms. It does not work here. Because Valery is supposedly sent to the gulag—and this is where he’s spent a good few years at the start of the book—but it feels somewhat played down, to say the least. It feels like “oh the gulag wasn’t so bad actually”.
Misogyny. Five Natasha Pulley books in and there’s a pattern emerging: for every gay couple there is, a woman is shafted and/or presented as despicable. Think Grace in Watchmaker (nasty), Pepperharrow in Pepperharrow (shafted), Agatha in The Kingdoms (nasty, shafted), and Mina in Bedlam Stacks (shafted, but at least still living). They all have a similar character type and they are all there to prevent the main couple from getting together. Please also note that they are, more often than not, the sole, and at all vaguely prominent, female character in the book. Frankly, at some point, you have to wonder about Pulley’s internalised misogyny. For reasons which I will elaborate on in the next point, I think Anna in this one is shafted more than most. She is presented as an ambitious scientist, but one who has no real motherly feelings, despite the four children she and Shenkov have produced. She’s cold, but nice enough. And, for a lot of the book, I thought she might prove me wrong about Pulley and misogyny. Then, the ending.
The ending. Skip this paragraph if you don’t want spoilers because boy will there be spoilers here.
So, while I gave this book 5 stars initially, I think in retrospect, it doesn’t merit that. I enjoyed it still, yes, but there were so many issues I had with it by the end, that it’s hard to convince myself it deserved those 5 stars. It was, overall, a little disappointing.
December 18, 2023
A bone-chilling novel. A secret atomic city in the Sovjet Union. A sweet and tender love story with oh-so-subtle pining.
If anyone had told me I’d be mesmerized by a book about radiation and biochemistry and terms like curies, millicuries, plutonium and polonium, I’d have told them they were crazy. And yet, here I am, gushing about such a book!
City 40 really existed and Natasha Pulley based the story on actual (terrifying) events. It caused chills that nestled themselves deep into my bones while my stomach knitted itself constantly in a knot, and showed bitterly sweet moments building up a love story so subtly that I hardly noticed there was a romance at all. Add the rather blunt and simple but exceptionally effective writing and two incredibly flawed but likable main characters, and I cannot do anything but surrender and read all of Natasha’s other books.
I have to be honest. I doubted my rating because the last part of the book suddenly made my brows knit together. But I loved the overall story so much and I’m in awe with the writing, and therefore just pushed the glorious five-star button!
Follow me on Instagram
If anyone had told me I’d be mesmerized by a book about radiation and biochemistry and terms like curies, millicuries, plutonium and polonium, I’d have told them they were crazy. And yet, here I am, gushing about such a book!
City 40 really existed and Natasha Pulley based the story on actual (terrifying) events. It caused chills that nestled themselves deep into my bones while my stomach knitted itself constantly in a knot, and showed bitterly sweet moments building up a love story so subtly that I hardly noticed there was a romance at all. Add the rather blunt and simple but exceptionally effective writing and two incredibly flawed but likable main characters, and I cannot do anything but surrender and read all of Natasha’s other books.
I have to be honest. I doubted my rating because the last part of the book suddenly made my brows knit together. But I loved the overall story so much and I’m in awe with the writing, and therefore just pushed the glorious five-star button!
Follow me on Instagram
January 6, 2023
The Half Life of Valery K is based on real events in the Soviet Union, though the characters are fictional.
Ozersk, or City 40, was the birthplace of the Soviet nuclear weapons program and was a highly radioactive site.
This novel follows Valery, a scientist who was sentenced to the gulag during Stalin's regime and who is later transported to City 40 to work on the radiation research being carried out.
As Valery uncovers the truth about City 40, things become ever more precarious for him. He knows if he speaks up to try to save lives he will probably be killed and so it's a constant inner battle of what to do and say.
He befriends Shenkov, the head of the KGB in City 40 whose character I found unbelievable. Yes, people can hide their true essence but really! This big teddy bear of a man with a heart of gold who only wants to help other people has managed to pretend to be a cold-hearted, evil KGB agent for twenty-five years? Not one person suspecting he's secretly helping people? Sorry, not buying it.
I also found it unbelievable that Valery would take it upon himself to tell Shenkov's 6-year old daughter that she's dying from leukemia. Daddy Shenkov, in shock after Valery tells him, is unable to answer Valery on whether or not she should be told.
So Valery informs this little girl without either of her parent's consent that, "It’s not something we know how to cure. That means you will probably die of it," further informing her that she will die before she can grow up.
Oh come on!
I didn't find the romance to be believable either and it simply served as a distraction from the main story. Why does almost every author feel the need to insert romance into historical fiction? (Or perhaps it's the agents or publishers who insist on it?)
This one was as predictable as it was unbelievable, I saw it coming from almost the beginning and rolled my eyes every time it was hinted at. At least it was between two men, which I find more palatable than between a woman and man (sorry, straight people), but I loathe reading about romantic feelings.
Yes, I'm cold-hearted.
I appreciated that I learned actual historical events from this novel and the title is very clever. The writing is good and it's not a bad book but could have been a lot better.
Ozersk, or City 40, was the birthplace of the Soviet nuclear weapons program and was a highly radioactive site.
This novel follows Valery, a scientist who was sentenced to the gulag during Stalin's regime and who is later transported to City 40 to work on the radiation research being carried out.
As Valery uncovers the truth about City 40, things become ever more precarious for him. He knows if he speaks up to try to save lives he will probably be killed and so it's a constant inner battle of what to do and say.
He befriends Shenkov, the head of the KGB in City 40 whose character I found unbelievable. Yes, people can hide their true essence but really! This big teddy bear of a man with a heart of gold who only wants to help other people has managed to pretend to be a cold-hearted, evil KGB agent for twenty-five years? Not one person suspecting he's secretly helping people? Sorry, not buying it.
I also found it unbelievable that Valery would take it upon himself to tell Shenkov's 6-year old daughter that she's dying from leukemia. Daddy Shenkov, in shock after Valery tells him, is unable to answer Valery on whether or not she should be told.
So Valery informs this little girl without either of her parent's consent that, "It’s not something we know how to cure. That means you will probably die of it," further informing her that she will die before she can grow up.
Oh come on!
I didn't find the romance to be believable either and it simply served as a distraction from the main story. Why does almost every author feel the need to insert romance into historical fiction? (Or perhaps it's the agents or publishers who insist on it?)
This one was as predictable as it was unbelievable, I saw it coming from almost the beginning and rolled my eyes every time it was hinted at. At least it was between two men, which I find more palatable than between a woman and man (sorry, straight people), but I loathe reading about romantic feelings.
Yes, I'm cold-hearted.
I appreciated that I learned actual historical events from this novel and the title is very clever. The writing is good and it's not a bad book but could have been a lot better.
September 17, 2022
In The Half Life of Valery K Natasha Pulley takes a different direction from her former books. This time she leaves her usual magical realism behind and concentrates on a story based in fact.
The book opens in 1963 in a Siberian Gulag where nuclear specialist Valery Kolkhanov is imprisoned. One day, out of the blue, he finds himself transferred to complete his sentence at City 40, working on radiation experiments. He quickly discovers that the place is not all that it is supposed to be, and has to decide whether to go along with the lies being told or to stand up and challenge them.
Pulley always centres her story around a romance between two men and in this one the central characters are Valery and a KGB officer called Shenkov. Both men are actually killers but they recognise in each other a core of goodness and reason. Their relationship is complicated and far reaching. The conclusion is inevitable and very dramatic. Some threads are deliberately left hanging - life is like that. We cannot always know the outcome of every individual's story.
An excellent read, recommended to any lover of historical fiction. And I nearly forgot to mention there is an octopus called Albert who steals every scene he is in! I want one.
The book opens in 1963 in a Siberian Gulag where nuclear specialist Valery Kolkhanov is imprisoned. One day, out of the blue, he finds himself transferred to complete his sentence at City 40, working on radiation experiments. He quickly discovers that the place is not all that it is supposed to be, and has to decide whether to go along with the lies being told or to stand up and challenge them.
Pulley always centres her story around a romance between two men and in this one the central characters are Valery and a KGB officer called Shenkov. Both men are actually killers but they recognise in each other a core of goodness and reason. Their relationship is complicated and far reaching. The conclusion is inevitable and very dramatic. Some threads are deliberately left hanging - life is like that. We cannot always know the outcome of every individual's story.
An excellent read, recommended to any lover of historical fiction. And I nearly forgot to mention there is an octopus called Albert who steals every scene he is in! I want one.
July 4, 2022
(See below for added reflection.)
Natasha Pulley's The Half Life of Valery K both is and isn't a change from her previous work.
Under is-a-change, we can file the fact that this novel is set in the Soviet Union during the cold war. It's also, with some specific exceptions, based on real-world material. Her setting did exist, though she had to do some inventing to fill in the unknowns.
Under isn't-a-change, we have a pair of men gradually falling in love, one of them more comfortable with what's happening between the two of them, the other much more uncertain. There's a crisis at the center of the novel, one that is at least as weighty as the terrorist attack around which The Watchmaker of Filigree Street is built. Also, there's an octopus.
The novel opens in a prison camp, where our central character, the Valery K of the title, suddenly finds he's being transferred to who-knows-where. Is he being sent to a different camp? Is he simply going to be taken out into the woods and shot? Is he being set up for a second set of accusations and punishment? Is he about to be tortured to try to force out any information he didn't provide when originally arrested?
Valery can think of all these possibilities and more in just seconds, and the novel continues in this way. Every character is attempting to read dangerous situations with insufficient evidence. Every character has to both speak in and decode the double-speak that is necessitated under the authoritarian government.
I wouldn't recommend this title as a first read if you aren't familiar with Pulley's work. If that's the case, go for The Watchmaker of Filigree Street or The Kingdoms. But every one of her books is worth reading. She has a remarkable ability to create imperfect characters, caught up in their own inner turmoil, that the reader can't help but care about.
I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher; the opinions are my own.
Added:
One aspect of The Half Life of Valery K that I found particularly striking was the presence/lack of gendered expectations. A moment when a female Soviet scientist is told "let the man speak" and is not addressed as "comrade" is shocking to a central character because it genders a professional conversation that shouldn't be gendered. When characters travel outside of the Soviet Union to what Westerners might describe as "normal" middle-class life they are shocked by the idea that a woman would not have a job, that she would be content as a housewife, and that her husband would see this as his due. The normal titles given in the west—Mr., Mrs., Ms.—are perceived as unnecessarily gendering all social and professional interactions. This is a minor theme, but it nonetheless throws an interesting light on gendered expectations that is visible because of cross-cultural differences.
Natasha Pulley's The Half Life of Valery K both is and isn't a change from her previous work.
Under is-a-change, we can file the fact that this novel is set in the Soviet Union during the cold war. It's also, with some specific exceptions, based on real-world material. Her setting did exist, though she had to do some inventing to fill in the unknowns.
Under isn't-a-change, we have a pair of men gradually falling in love, one of them more comfortable with what's happening between the two of them, the other much more uncertain. There's a crisis at the center of the novel, one that is at least as weighty as the terrorist attack around which The Watchmaker of Filigree Street is built. Also, there's an octopus.
The novel opens in a prison camp, where our central character, the Valery K of the title, suddenly finds he's being transferred to who-knows-where. Is he being sent to a different camp? Is he simply going to be taken out into the woods and shot? Is he being set up for a second set of accusations and punishment? Is he about to be tortured to try to force out any information he didn't provide when originally arrested?
Valery can think of all these possibilities and more in just seconds, and the novel continues in this way. Every character is attempting to read dangerous situations with insufficient evidence. Every character has to both speak in and decode the double-speak that is necessitated under the authoritarian government.
I wouldn't recommend this title as a first read if you aren't familiar with Pulley's work. If that's the case, go for The Watchmaker of Filigree Street or The Kingdoms. But every one of her books is worth reading. She has a remarkable ability to create imperfect characters, caught up in their own inner turmoil, that the reader can't help but care about.
I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher; the opinions are my own.
Added:
One aspect of The Half Life of Valery K that I found particularly striking was the presence/lack of gendered expectations. A moment when a female Soviet scientist is told "let the man speak" and is not addressed as "comrade" is shocking to a central character because it genders a professional conversation that shouldn't be gendered. When characters travel outside of the Soviet Union to what Westerners might describe as "normal" middle-class life they are shocked by the idea that a woman would not have a job, that she would be content as a housewife, and that her husband would see this as his due. The normal titles given in the west—Mr., Mrs., Ms.—are perceived as unnecessarily gendering all social and professional interactions. This is a minor theme, but it nonetheless throws an interesting light on gendered expectations that is visible because of cross-cultural differences.
May 13, 2022
Another fantastic Natasha Pulley novel. Raw and wry and powerful. Can't recommend it enough.
July 17, 2022
i'll preface this by saying i don't think i am the target audience for this book, being a daughter of jewish immigrants from soviet russia. not sure who the target audience is, actually! let me know if you can figure that one out.
and i don't think every book should be catered to me obviously, but i adored natasha pulley's the kingdoms, and i was looking forward to reading this one! it's always interesting to read books in settings that are meaningful or familiar to me. perhaps this time it felt a little too personal and uncomfortable, and i couldn't shake off that feeling of wrongness, despite the book starting off strong and gripping right away.
i wanted to like this book, i wanted to like valery - and i did, until it was revealed he took part in human experiments on jewish people and homosexuals in nazi germany, with the literal, actual josef mengele. god i wish i was kidding. i cannot tell you how unprepared and blindsided i was encountering the smiling and polite character of dr. mengele in a (among other things, romance!!!!!) book that i knew handled heavy subjects, but maybe not *quite* like this.
i'm not sure how anyone could get through reading the following scene without feeling it was extremely unnecessary, unwanted, out of line, and frankly insane:
"...Human radiation studies sound odd, but I guarantee that every nation in the world with nuclear capacity is conducting them in one form or other. Germany was running human studies in the thirties and I know because I worked on them.’ He had to screw his eyes shut. ‘I worked on them. If I were German, I’d have been condemned in the Nuremberg trials for what happened in those studies. I’d be in prison now for war crimes. It isn’t ridiculous.’
He thought he’d controlled his voice well, but beyond the cubicle door, Shenkov stopped pacing, and there was a long silence.
‘How old were you?’ Shenkov said.
‘What?’
‘In Germany.’
‘Nineteen, I was an undergrad. I worked in the same lab as …’ Valery pressed one hand over his eyes, because he wanted to cry even though he hadn’t cried for years, and dug his fingernails hard into his orbital bone ‘ … Josef fucking Mengele.’
‘It wasn’t your fault. You were doing as you were told.’
‘I could have walked out, I didn’t.’
‘You were a child,’ Shenkov said, half over him. He was just on the other side of the door now. Valery touched it, wanting to open it, and not. ‘Anyway, human trials. Tell me how it would work here.’"
listen, i love a messed up character. i love when characters make messed up choices, hard choices. i like villains. i loved missouri kite from the kingdoms, and he did (spoiler)
i don't feel like this is the same! i don't.
this is, again, too real - and i hope not just for me. this is a work of fiction, yes, but these are real historical events that happened, and not that long ago. this isn't a fantasy book, or even science fiction really. given how sensitive this topic already is, i don't understand why pulley would choose to ground it in reality like *that*, putting her characters side by side with hitler's angel of death. and worse, i don't understand why she would write this scene attempting to "but the other side-" us via someone who, according to the text itself, should've been on trial for real life war crimes. those crimes aren't fiction. i don't understand what pulley's angle is here - the scene is written as though we are expected to agree with shenkov and sympathize with valery, feel sorry for him because he was only "doing what he was told" (funny she should use this phrasing) and he feels bad and wants to cry. is that the goal? truly?
and then dismissing it with an "anyway..."???
please let me know if i'm missing something here, and this scene was actually intended to be a criticism or something.
another point that confused me was when valery spoke of the gulag to the students at the lab, and they were all in disbelief:
"‘I did a year abroad as part of my degree, I went to Berlin. It went on record somewhere, and I was arrested in … fifty-six.’
‘That’s all?’ a girl said.
Valery took care not to laugh. ‘If you spend any time in a capitalist country you’ll be sent to the gulag, whatever you did there.’
Unsettled looks slithered between them all.
One boy was annoyed. ‘If you were truly loyal to the Party, you’d have been shot before you worked for the enemy though, wouldn’t you.’
‘They weren’t the enemy then, the borders were open. It was nineteen thirty-seven. The Party sent me.’
‘But then …’
‘Every third person in the gulag is an academic,’ he said, slowly, because it was bizarre to stumble across someone who didn’t know that. He had thought the whole world knew. It had all come out after Stalin died, which was why Valery had almost laughed when he found himself being arrested a good three years after that. You could have papier-mâchéd Siberia with the reams of newsprint written about the arrests and the trials, but under no cover but a penitent air, the Kremlin had kept it going all the same. ‘People aren’t sent because of what they’ve done, they’re sent because of what they might do under the right conditions.’
‘Why doesn’t anyone know that? If there’s that many people then why haven’t we met any?’
Valery wanted to ask what the boy meant by anyone; anyone under twenty-five, it sounded like. But that would have been cruel.
‘Because most of those people have no trade skills, so they’re assigned to general labour, which is usually mining, in minus sixty degrees, so they die. So you never hear from them.’
‘It can’t be all that many people then,’ the boy said..."
now i admit i don't know enough about the history here, but that felt wrong, so i had to call my dear ex soviet dad to inquire. i explained that it sounded odd to me that people didn't know what was going on, and he said, "alright, i'll give you some examples. your grandfather spent 10 years at the gulag. his sister was executed at the gulag. his uncle was executed at the gulag. do you want me to keep going? everyone knew, because everyone had a family member, or a friend, or a neighbor - at least one - who'd been arrested. everyone did know, because the kgb got to even the most godforsaken remote villages, and they shut up about it because they were scared they would be next." (and then he told me i should read a book about this written by a russian person, which maybe i should've done.)
so again: not sure why pulley would've gone for this angle. shock value? or maybe just historical inaccuracy?
this is getting long, so i will sum up by saying this just did not sit right with me. natasha pulley's writing is good, and i thought she knew how to write a good morally grey character, but maybe this book was a bit of an ambitious reach, because all it did was make me uncomfortable. i can't read a book where the guy who contributed to the nazi effort gets his happy ending, let alone a romance. i am thoroughly confused how anyone else could, but i guess i just wasn't the right reader for this.
and i don't think every book should be catered to me obviously, but i adored natasha pulley's the kingdoms, and i was looking forward to reading this one! it's always interesting to read books in settings that are meaningful or familiar to me. perhaps this time it felt a little too personal and uncomfortable, and i couldn't shake off that feeling of wrongness, despite the book starting off strong and gripping right away.
i wanted to like this book, i wanted to like valery - and i did, until it was revealed he took part in human experiments on jewish people and homosexuals in nazi germany, with the literal, actual josef mengele. god i wish i was kidding. i cannot tell you how unprepared and blindsided i was encountering the smiling and polite character of dr. mengele in a (among other things, romance!!!!!) book that i knew handled heavy subjects, but maybe not *quite* like this.
i'm not sure how anyone could get through reading the following scene without feeling it was extremely unnecessary, unwanted, out of line, and frankly insane:
"...Human radiation studies sound odd, but I guarantee that every nation in the world with nuclear capacity is conducting them in one form or other. Germany was running human studies in the thirties and I know because I worked on them.’ He had to screw his eyes shut. ‘I worked on them. If I were German, I’d have been condemned in the Nuremberg trials for what happened in those studies. I’d be in prison now for war crimes. It isn’t ridiculous.’
He thought he’d controlled his voice well, but beyond the cubicle door, Shenkov stopped pacing, and there was a long silence.
‘How old were you?’ Shenkov said.
‘What?’
‘In Germany.’
‘Nineteen, I was an undergrad. I worked in the same lab as …’ Valery pressed one hand over his eyes, because he wanted to cry even though he hadn’t cried for years, and dug his fingernails hard into his orbital bone ‘ … Josef fucking Mengele.’
‘It wasn’t your fault. You were doing as you were told.’
‘I could have walked out, I didn’t.’
‘You were a child,’ Shenkov said, half over him. He was just on the other side of the door now. Valery touched it, wanting to open it, and not. ‘Anyway, human trials. Tell me how it would work here.’"
listen, i love a messed up character. i love when characters make messed up choices, hard choices. i like villains. i loved missouri kite from the kingdoms, and he did (spoiler)
i don't feel like this is the same! i don't.
this is, again, too real - and i hope not just for me. this is a work of fiction, yes, but these are real historical events that happened, and not that long ago. this isn't a fantasy book, or even science fiction really. given how sensitive this topic already is, i don't understand why pulley would choose to ground it in reality like *that*, putting her characters side by side with hitler's angel of death. and worse, i don't understand why she would write this scene attempting to "but the other side-" us via someone who, according to the text itself, should've been on trial for real life war crimes. those crimes aren't fiction. i don't understand what pulley's angle is here - the scene is written as though we are expected to agree with shenkov and sympathize with valery, feel sorry for him because he was only "doing what he was told" (funny she should use this phrasing) and he feels bad and wants to cry. is that the goal? truly?
and then dismissing it with an "anyway..."???
please let me know if i'm missing something here, and this scene was actually intended to be a criticism or something.
another point that confused me was when valery spoke of the gulag to the students at the lab, and they were all in disbelief:
"‘I did a year abroad as part of my degree, I went to Berlin. It went on record somewhere, and I was arrested in … fifty-six.’
‘That’s all?’ a girl said.
Valery took care not to laugh. ‘If you spend any time in a capitalist country you’ll be sent to the gulag, whatever you did there.’
Unsettled looks slithered between them all.
One boy was annoyed. ‘If you were truly loyal to the Party, you’d have been shot before you worked for the enemy though, wouldn’t you.’
‘They weren’t the enemy then, the borders were open. It was nineteen thirty-seven. The Party sent me.’
‘But then …’
‘Every third person in the gulag is an academic,’ he said, slowly, because it was bizarre to stumble across someone who didn’t know that. He had thought the whole world knew. It had all come out after Stalin died, which was why Valery had almost laughed when he found himself being arrested a good three years after that. You could have papier-mâchéd Siberia with the reams of newsprint written about the arrests and the trials, but under no cover but a penitent air, the Kremlin had kept it going all the same. ‘People aren’t sent because of what they’ve done, they’re sent because of what they might do under the right conditions.’
‘Why doesn’t anyone know that? If there’s that many people then why haven’t we met any?’
Valery wanted to ask what the boy meant by anyone; anyone under twenty-five, it sounded like. But that would have been cruel.
‘Because most of those people have no trade skills, so they’re assigned to general labour, which is usually mining, in minus sixty degrees, so they die. So you never hear from them.’
‘It can’t be all that many people then,’ the boy said..."
now i admit i don't know enough about the history here, but that felt wrong, so i had to call my dear ex soviet dad to inquire. i explained that it sounded odd to me that people didn't know what was going on, and he said, "alright, i'll give you some examples. your grandfather spent 10 years at the gulag. his sister was executed at the gulag. his uncle was executed at the gulag. do you want me to keep going? everyone knew, because everyone had a family member, or a friend, or a neighbor - at least one - who'd been arrested. everyone did know, because the kgb got to even the most godforsaken remote villages, and they shut up about it because they were scared they would be next." (and then he told me i should read a book about this written by a russian person, which maybe i should've done.)
so again: not sure why pulley would've gone for this angle. shock value? or maybe just historical inaccuracy?
this is getting long, so i will sum up by saying this just did not sit right with me. natasha pulley's writing is good, and i thought she knew how to write a good morally grey character, but maybe this book was a bit of an ambitious reach, because all it did was make me uncomfortable. i can't read a book where the guy who contributed to the nazi effort gets his happy ending, let alone a romance. i am thoroughly confused how anyone else could, but i guess i just wasn't the right reader for this.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 1, 2024
another home run from our gal Natty P
July 30, 2022
This book is just SO.BAD. I’m so sorry to give such a low rating to a Natasha Pulley’s book, but honestly one star is even more than this book deserves. I wonder if there was any research at all done for it! There’s an insane amount of factual mistakes, and I’m not even talking about the scientific side of things or about the stuff that you could argue was kept secret from me as someone from Russia. It’s the small stuff, like female surnames that don’t end in -vna (it should be Anna Shenkova, not Shenkovna); the TV that didn’t show you anything at night (the programs usually started at 5 pm and went until 11 or maybe 12), non-existent Lenin Day and Land Rovers (really, Land Rovers?? In the USSR??); and the ever present coffee - do the British think they’ve invented tea drinking for every occasion or something? Russia is a famously tea drinking country, come on. And there are many, many more examples of that, some of which were pretty crucial to the plot.
For the life of me I can’t get it why Natasha thought it was a good idea to write a story set in a country and at a time period she knows nothing about. She could have made it an imaginary, Soviet-inspired place and it would have probably worked, but as it is it’s just ridiculous and frankly obnoxious.
The main characters didn’t make me feel anything, and everyone in the USSR being some kind of a psychopath didn’t help, either. The ending is insane, and not in a good way, too 😅 I guess I’ll proceed to pretend this book doesn’t even exist.
For the life of me I can’t get it why Natasha thought it was a good idea to write a story set in a country and at a time period she knows nothing about. She could have made it an imaginary, Soviet-inspired place and it would have probably worked, but as it is it’s just ridiculous and frankly obnoxious.
The main characters didn’t make me feel anything, and everyone in the USSR being some kind of a psychopath didn’t help, either. The ending is insane, and not in a good way, too 😅 I guess I’ll proceed to pretend this book doesn’t even exist.
February 28, 2024
2.5 Stars
Chillingly based on a real nuclear incident in the Soviet Union in 1957, Natasha Pulley creates a plausible tale of a human radiation trial in her novel The Half Life of Valery K.
What worked for me in this novel:
the set up of the characters
the descriptions of City 40 and the surrounding area
the basic premise of her plot
Pulley's propulsive writing; she had me turning pages until I would bump up against something that didn't work
What didn't work for me:
the lack of understanding of Russian mind/attitudes/general knowledge
the awkward love story
the inability to shape the prose to have me feel the paranoia and terror
the neat resolution
Publication 2022
Chillingly based on a real nuclear incident in the Soviet Union in 1957, Natasha Pulley creates a plausible tale of a human radiation trial in her novel The Half Life of Valery K.
What worked for me in this novel:
the set up of the characters
the descriptions of City 40 and the surrounding area
the basic premise of her plot
Pulley's propulsive writing; she had me turning pages until I would bump up against something that didn't work
What didn't work for me:
the lack of understanding of Russian mind/attitudes/general knowledge
the awkward love story
the inability to shape the prose to have me feel the paranoia and terror
the neat resolution
Publication 2022
February 27, 2022
Cast of characters:
- things that go boom
- cuddles under both the best and worst circumstances
- heart to heart confessions in a shower room
- code words and crimes
- "I love you" without ever saying "I love you"
- one lonely middle-aged man (46 M) meets another lonely middle-aged man (51 M) and together find peace for the first time in their lives
Valery K is a Chernobyl-style historical/science drama that only Natasha Pulley can pull off. I mean, leave it to her to describe the grisly effects of radiation exposure on one page and a whimsical octopus pet that can work a TV remote on the next. And at the center of it, a sad biologist who was plucked from a freezing Siberian prison into a possibly more dangerous Soviet research facility. A sad biologist who has to navigate terrible lies, silence, a KGB officer who just wants to do his job, and execution from a state that believes in an immaculate image above all.
The story is a sobering reminder of what governments are willing to do to keep two steps ahead, especially in the Cold War era, and how a lot of modern medicine and science were developed on the backs of such actions. But beyond the secrets and subterfuge, it's about trauma. How we cause it, carry its ricochets in woven chains around our necks, punishing ourselves even as we reach for comfort. There's such an intimate tragedy to it all. No time travels or huge battles. No mythical cities. Just two people caught in the middle of a political storm that could destroy them inside out.
Valery fits into the mold of the classic Pulley protagonist: intelligent, burns with a quiet inner fire, and desperately alone in this world. Whose only want is a sliver of a moment when the shadow they're talking to isn't just their own (though clutching a pillow fort in bed because he can't fall asleep from the sheer aloneness of everything is a whole new level). With him we also get a subtle but empathic representation of neurodivergence and nonbinary identity.
He's also the most bruised and frayed of the Pulley protagonists. He's spent nearly two decades incarcerated, abused and beaten, and a great part of him is still stuck in that world, in the survival mindset. You can't be broken if you wall yourself off. Hope can't be shattered if you don't carry it around with you like a glittering badge. A punch to the kidney isn't so bad if you're expecting it. Keep the smile. Keep the magic.
It's painful to see him presented with basic provisions and kindness in the research facility - proper food, hot drinks, chocolate - and wanting them to his bones, but fearing their legitimacy. His trauma, and the way it seeps out in unexpected and expected places, and completely consumes him at times, is depicted so humanly. Always he's two steps away from crumbling to pieces. And that, conversely, lends him a steel strength. The kind forged by knowing that you can still crawl even when they break your kneecaps.
His love interest Konstantin Shenkov is a walking "not like the other baddies" trope. Except when Shenkov wears it, it's a good trope. He wears it like a twenty-thousand dollar suit. He's a KGB security officer who is startlingly naive at times to news of human suffering and atrocities, often committed by men like himself. It's a believable ignorance because under the stone-faced exterior, he's a sweet person - no-nonsense but patient and caring. A good case of someone trying to make the best of a bad situation, because the alternative could be much worse for him and his family.
There's some fantastic characterization for Valery and Shenkov. Pulley is world class here as always. There were passages I had to reread multiple times from sheer writerly envy and awe that with six sentences, Pulley manages to strip apart the entire psyche of a character. I think a good way to gauge people in real life is to examine how they make you feel when you're in their presence, and then how you feel once you leave it. The same goes for character relationships. We know exactly how Valery feels with and without Shenkov, and it goes beyond the basic "protagonist pines for a hot person." It's a tangle of distrust, contradictions, warmth, and ultimately, selfishness. She hones in magnificently on the core of their behaviours, and some of the resulting scenes took my breath away.
Their dynamic is made all the more beautiful because of Valery's past - what he's done, what's been done to him, the weight of them. Maybe a warm touch can't pry away years of embedded shards under skin. But it can fucking well try.
The plot is a straightforward "the government is hiding something, let's find out what," with occasional flashback chapters that take us through Valery and Shenkov's earlier years. This all takes place in City 40, the site of a long-form experiment started by the Kremlin to understand the effects of radiation in a large ecosystem. Silence reigns here, and any attempt to break it and inform the outside world is met with a shot to the head. Which sounds like a thriller, but it really isn't. It's still a Natasha Pulley book and there's a languid slice-of-life tone to everything, even when desperate things are happening on the side. She has a knack for writing desolate and strange occurrences with an almost twinkle in her eyes.
Overall, it's a story that's easy to follow and safe to enjoy. I really didn't have a problem with the plot until near the end. But the ending is a culmination of problems I have with all of Pulley's books, so it may not resonate with new readers.
For the veterans, though, two words for you: Female. Characters.
There are two main female characters in the book. Resovkaya, Valery's old advisor and the head researcher of the facility within City 40 named the Lighthouse. And Anna, a genius nuclear physicist who is married to Shenkov and has four adorable children with him.
I've seen it before and once again I'm sitting here disappointed by the trajectory that both characters take. They're both headstrong women, brilliant in their field of work, and I had high hopes from how they were set up. Resovkaya is an older woman and enters the story with glittering red heels, lighthearted sass and a sway to her hips. She seemed to be a complex character with interesting sets of morals. Anna is pragmatic and easy-going and refuses to take no for an answer.
One, however, had the unfortunate life choice of being married to the protagonist's love interest. The other had the unfortunate life choice of being the major female character of the story.
Without delving into big spoilers, I found the latter parts of the book a repeat of what's been done before in Pulley's previous work, and not even an imaginative twist of them. I think these issues come up time and time again because so much of the focus is on the eventual happiness of the main pairing, even at the expense of the side characters (who are usually women). They have to contort themselves to fit that narrative. Sometimes it works, but more often than not, their plotlines are rather reduced to clichés to make way for the couple.
But even when I'm let down by some aspects of her work, I'm still utterly in love with it as a whole. The stark forested lake surrounded by marshland. The past reaching forward to clutch at the characters. The quiet glory of it all.
And well. That's a contradiction I'm willing to accept.
Content warnings:
~~
Review copy provided by the publisher. All opinions are my own.
- things that go boom
- cuddles under both the best and worst circumstances
- heart to heart confessions in a shower room
- code words and crimes
- "I love you" without ever saying "I love you"
- one lonely middle-aged man (46 M) meets another lonely middle-aged man (51 M) and together find peace for the first time in their lives
Valery K is a Chernobyl-style historical/science drama that only Natasha Pulley can pull off. I mean, leave it to her to describe the grisly effects of radiation exposure on one page and a whimsical octopus pet that can work a TV remote on the next. And at the center of it, a sad biologist who was plucked from a freezing Siberian prison into a possibly more dangerous Soviet research facility. A sad biologist who has to navigate terrible lies, silence, a KGB officer who just wants to do his job, and execution from a state that believes in an immaculate image above all.
The story is a sobering reminder of what governments are willing to do to keep two steps ahead, especially in the Cold War era, and how a lot of modern medicine and science were developed on the backs of such actions. But beyond the secrets and subterfuge, it's about trauma. How we cause it, carry its ricochets in woven chains around our necks, punishing ourselves even as we reach for comfort. There's such an intimate tragedy to it all. No time travels or huge battles. No mythical cities. Just two people caught in the middle of a political storm that could destroy them inside out.
Valery fits into the mold of the classic Pulley protagonist: intelligent, burns with a quiet inner fire, and desperately alone in this world. Whose only want is a sliver of a moment when the shadow they're talking to isn't just their own (though clutching a pillow fort in bed because he can't fall asleep from the sheer aloneness of everything is a whole new level). With him we also get a subtle but empathic representation of neurodivergence and nonbinary identity.
He's also the most bruised and frayed of the Pulley protagonists. He's spent nearly two decades incarcerated, abused and beaten, and a great part of him is still stuck in that world, in the survival mindset. You can't be broken if you wall yourself off. Hope can't be shattered if you don't carry it around with you like a glittering badge. A punch to the kidney isn't so bad if you're expecting it. Keep the smile. Keep the magic.
It's painful to see him presented with basic provisions and kindness in the research facility - proper food, hot drinks, chocolate - and wanting them to his bones, but fearing their legitimacy. His trauma, and the way it seeps out in unexpected and expected places, and completely consumes him at times, is depicted so humanly. Always he's two steps away from crumbling to pieces. And that, conversely, lends him a steel strength. The kind forged by knowing that you can still crawl even when they break your kneecaps.
His love interest Konstantin Shenkov is a walking "not like the other baddies" trope. Except when Shenkov wears it, it's a good trope. He wears it like a twenty-thousand dollar suit. He's a KGB security officer who is startlingly naive at times to news of human suffering and atrocities, often committed by men like himself. It's a believable ignorance because under the stone-faced exterior, he's a sweet person - no-nonsense but patient and caring. A good case of someone trying to make the best of a bad situation, because the alternative could be much worse for him and his family.
There's some fantastic characterization for Valery and Shenkov. Pulley is world class here as always. There were passages I had to reread multiple times from sheer writerly envy and awe that with six sentences, Pulley manages to strip apart the entire psyche of a character. I think a good way to gauge people in real life is to examine how they make you feel when you're in their presence, and then how you feel once you leave it. The same goes for character relationships. We know exactly how Valery feels with and without Shenkov, and it goes beyond the basic "protagonist pines for a hot person." It's a tangle of distrust, contradictions, warmth, and ultimately, selfishness. She hones in magnificently on the core of their behaviours, and some of the resulting scenes took my breath away.
Their dynamic is made all the more beautiful because of Valery's past - what he's done, what's been done to him, the weight of them. Maybe a warm touch can't pry away years of embedded shards under skin. But it can fucking well try.
The plot is a straightforward "the government is hiding something, let's find out what," with occasional flashback chapters that take us through Valery and Shenkov's earlier years. This all takes place in City 40, the site of a long-form experiment started by the Kremlin to understand the effects of radiation in a large ecosystem. Silence reigns here, and any attempt to break it and inform the outside world is met with a shot to the head. Which sounds like a thriller, but it really isn't. It's still a Natasha Pulley book and there's a languid slice-of-life tone to everything, even when desperate things are happening on the side. She has a knack for writing desolate and strange occurrences with an almost twinkle in her eyes.
Overall, it's a story that's easy to follow and safe to enjoy. I really didn't have a problem with the plot until near the end. But the ending is a culmination of problems I have with all of Pulley's books, so it may not resonate with new readers.
For the veterans, though, two words for you: Female. Characters.
There are two main female characters in the book. Resovkaya, Valery's old advisor and the head researcher of the facility within City 40 named the Lighthouse. And Anna, a genius nuclear physicist who is married to Shenkov and has four adorable children with him.
I've seen it before and once again I'm sitting here disappointed by the trajectory that both characters take. They're both headstrong women, brilliant in their field of work, and I had high hopes from how they were set up. Resovkaya is an older woman and enters the story with glittering red heels, lighthearted sass and a sway to her hips. She seemed to be a complex character with interesting sets of morals. Anna is pragmatic and easy-going and refuses to take no for an answer.
One, however, had the unfortunate life choice of being married to the protagonist's love interest. The other had the unfortunate life choice of being the major female character of the story.
Without delving into big spoilers, I found the latter parts of the book a repeat of what's been done before in Pulley's previous work, and not even an imaginative twist of them. I think these issues come up time and time again because so much of the focus is on the eventual happiness of the main pairing, even at the expense of the side characters (who are usually women). They have to contort themselves to fit that narrative. Sometimes it works, but more often than not, their plotlines are rather reduced to clichés to make way for the couple.
But even when I'm let down by some aspects of her work, I'm still utterly in love with it as a whole. The stark forested lake surrounded by marshland. The past reaching forward to clutch at the characters. The quiet glory of it all.
And well. That's a contradiction I'm willing to accept.
Content warnings:
~~
Review copy provided by the publisher. All opinions are my own.
June 15, 2022
I was so entrenched in the main character’s life, I didn’t want this book to end. From the first pages, I was swept away and immediately empathetic to Valery’s circumstances (I also needed to know what was happening to him, as I shared in his confusion).
But, for me, it went beyond character. I was a pre-teen/teen growing up during the Cold War, which, I think, predisposed my fascination with the secrecy factor of Russian politics (the book-jacket copy indicates the novel is based on historical truths, which only furthered my interest). Now, with the tragedies occurring in the Ukraine, the book may hold even more significance for readers, though it does not specifically address that historic struggle. More than anything, it provides insight to a national ideology.
The language, also, is beautiful, the characters emotionally fleshed, and the plot superb. I had a visceral reaction at one point in the book – complete stomach aches for the worry I had about a particular event. That’s good writing! And here are some additional examples:
He forced himself to look at her properly. He had never liked looking anyone full in the face. It felt as invasive as poking them in the chest, and the instinct not to do it was powerful, even if he was surrounded by people who insisted it was the polite thing.
He was in no state to cope with kindness. With no family and no people of your own to build up your resistance to it, kindness was like a triple shot of vodka after being teetotal for years. It went straight to the head.
He stood in the way that bears do when they aren’t sure if they want to eat you …
A lot of things went a bright colour to warn you that they were poisonous, and it was helpful even of lakes to do the same thing.
Finally, I love science, so the scientific aspects of nuclear studies and radioactivity were of great interest (even if you don’t love science, don’t shy away!)
You will learn about Stalin’s labor camps and the 20 million people who went through them. You will learn some things unknown to the general public. You will go back into the late 30s, with references to the evil Josef Mengele and his human twin studies during the Holocaust. But you will stay mostly in mid-60s Russia with two characters, in particular, who will tug at your heartstrings. And you will meet a loveable octopus!
I have one quibble, and I hope it won’t be a deterrent for many readers, as I think it was a gutsy stylistic choice (and one I still don’t fully understand)… but this book does not follow standard capitalization. (I did not include actual capitalization in my examples above). Some sentences start with caps, some don’t. Some proper names have caps, but most don’t. I tried to discern the pattern early on and found it so distracting, I had to re-read the first 20 pages. I was willing to do so, because 1) I was interested in the book 2) I knew my brain would learn to gloss over the punctuation eventually so that I would stop seeing it. That DID, in fact, happen.
I wonder if the point was to make the reader ‘feel’ the same disorientation as the characters? I’d have appreciated some author’s note to that effect. Maybe an interview, upon publication, will address this stylistic technique. I truly hope it doesn’t dissuade some readers from giving this a go, because it’s a fantastic book. And I hope it is optioned for film; hands down, Jon Hamm MUST play the character of Shenkov!!!
Thank you to NetGalley and Bloomsbury USA Publishing for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.
But, for me, it went beyond character. I was a pre-teen/teen growing up during the Cold War, which, I think, predisposed my fascination with the secrecy factor of Russian politics (the book-jacket copy indicates the novel is based on historical truths, which only furthered my interest). Now, with the tragedies occurring in the Ukraine, the book may hold even more significance for readers, though it does not specifically address that historic struggle. More than anything, it provides insight to a national ideology.
The language, also, is beautiful, the characters emotionally fleshed, and the plot superb. I had a visceral reaction at one point in the book – complete stomach aches for the worry I had about a particular event. That’s good writing! And here are some additional examples:
He forced himself to look at her properly. He had never liked looking anyone full in the face. It felt as invasive as poking them in the chest, and the instinct not to do it was powerful, even if he was surrounded by people who insisted it was the polite thing.
He was in no state to cope with kindness. With no family and no people of your own to build up your resistance to it, kindness was like a triple shot of vodka after being teetotal for years. It went straight to the head.
He stood in the way that bears do when they aren’t sure if they want to eat you …
A lot of things went a bright colour to warn you that they were poisonous, and it was helpful even of lakes to do the same thing.
Finally, I love science, so the scientific aspects of nuclear studies and radioactivity were of great interest (even if you don’t love science, don’t shy away!)
You will learn about Stalin’s labor camps and the 20 million people who went through them. You will learn some things unknown to the general public. You will go back into the late 30s, with references to the evil Josef Mengele and his human twin studies during the Holocaust. But you will stay mostly in mid-60s Russia with two characters, in particular, who will tug at your heartstrings. And you will meet a loveable octopus!
I have one quibble, and I hope it won’t be a deterrent for many readers, as I think it was a gutsy stylistic choice (and one I still don’t fully understand)… but this book does not follow standard capitalization. (I did not include actual capitalization in my examples above). Some sentences start with caps, some don’t. Some proper names have caps, but most don’t. I tried to discern the pattern early on and found it so distracting, I had to re-read the first 20 pages. I was willing to do so, because 1) I was interested in the book 2) I knew my brain would learn to gloss over the punctuation eventually so that I would stop seeing it. That DID, in fact, happen.
I wonder if the point was to make the reader ‘feel’ the same disorientation as the characters? I’d have appreciated some author’s note to that effect. Maybe an interview, upon publication, will address this stylistic technique. I truly hope it doesn’t dissuade some readers from giving this a go, because it’s a fantastic book. And I hope it is optioned for film; hands down, Jon Hamm MUST play the character of Shenkov!!!
Thank you to NetGalley and Bloomsbury USA Publishing for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.
September 10, 2022
This was a decent listen on audio.
Based on actual events and information, we follow Valery from the prison camp where he was committed to a secret town where he's to work with others studying the effects of radiation on plants and animals. As the story proceeds, he becomes suspicious of what he's been told, suspecting more nefarious purposes at worst, and clueless carelessness at best, as he sees signs of much worse contamination than reported.
This is part mystery, part history, and part love story. Unraveling the mystery serves as the largest layer of the story, with hints at the actual historical events, and whispers of the love story gently appearing during quiet moments and bold actions. Since I'm not a big fan of love stories, I appreciated how the author handled this component of the connection between Valery and Shenkov. It seemed genuine and artfully indicated.
The characters were distinct and well-drawn and made me want to see them succeed and survive. I learned a lot about radiation, even if I didn't understand it all, and it appalled me to know this kind of thing has taken place at various times around the world.
Bonus points for the octopus scenes. Now I want one!
Based on actual events and information, we follow Valery from the prison camp where he was committed to a secret town where he's to work with others studying the effects of radiation on plants and animals. As the story proceeds, he becomes suspicious of what he's been told, suspecting more nefarious purposes at worst, and clueless carelessness at best, as he sees signs of much worse contamination than reported.
This is part mystery, part history, and part love story. Unraveling the mystery serves as the largest layer of the story, with hints at the actual historical events, and whispers of the love story gently appearing during quiet moments and bold actions. Since I'm not a big fan of love stories, I appreciated how the author handled this component of the connection between Valery and Shenkov. It seemed genuine and artfully indicated.
The characters were distinct and well-drawn and made me want to see them succeed and survive. I learned a lot about radiation, even if I didn't understand it all, and it appalled me to know this kind of thing has taken place at various times around the world.
Bonus points for the octopus scenes. Now I want one!
August 1, 2022
EDIT 01/08/2022 after second reread
Okay, review after second reread with Varia: sadly my opinion of this book plunged. Varia is a lot more knowledgeable about Soviet life and customs (here's her review), so she picked up on a LOT more historical inaccuracies than I did. It feels very British in some parts, even the language used like "you wot mate" type of phrases which also threw me off in the audio (don't get me wrong, the narrator was lovely and I know he adopted the accent to show those people were from a different social class), but come on, man, this is not a London suburb.
I had to relive the Red Train chapter again which made me feel so icky and nauseated. Also all the weird gender/fake feminism. No, please no. And the ending, whyyyy.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Original review posted 28/06/2022
This book is polarising af, and I'm curious to see where Pulley stans will stand - I think it will largely depend on your background. I'm going to admit that my rating is the least objective one ever, and if it had been any other author, it would have been 3 stars at best.
Readers from Eastern Europe are going to feel weird af about this. Or at least I know I did. The writing is excellent, there's a wide variety of complex characters, it feels like the science was well-researched, but is it really appropriate to have a romance between a former gulag prisoner and a KGB boss? But even ignoring that, the gender stuff and the misogyny was cringy.
There's one weird part where Valery thinks about how titles like Mister are gendered and that it is as if people called each other by their genitals???? Huh???? Exact quote “every single person reminded every single time they were named of that one part of them that defined everything they were meant to be, and nobody ever seemed to sit back and say, but we would never call anyone Penis Harrison; how’s mister any different?”
Listen, I have a very limited understanding of Russian grammar, but it is not a genderless language? Especially when you'd have a distinction between Shenkov (the husband) and then Anna Shenkova...
Natasha Pulley must have heard me complain about misogyny in her previous books, because it's as if she's trying to be super feminist in this one, but it totally backfired. There was a huge emphasis on having women scientists, which is great, but since the whole book is from Valery's pov, it is odd some of the things he notices and mentions. Not saying women in Soviet Russia weren't more emancipated, but they were certainly not on equal status. The fact that Valery seems hyper aware of misogyny happening to his former mentor or to Anna... I don't know, it's kind of the author's way to wave at you and say how feminist they are, but it just trikes me as insincere. Also the constant reminders of how women in Russia have it better off than in the West... like okay, we get it? Not necessarily true, but whatever.
But also can we talk about how most of Pulley's female characters are mean hardasses? Grace, Agatha and now Rezovskaya (and Anna to a lesser extent), they all seem to be cut from the same ruthless cloth, and they are all eliminated in awful ways because they stand in the gay couple's way. I don't know if this is newsflash, but there is no need for these characters to be in the book? There's no reason for a woman to stand in their way... and honestly the ending made me feel incredibly queasy, because I honestly doubt Shenkov would have
Anyway, rant over. I appreciate the timing of this book is not great, and maybe if Natasha could have done more research on site it would have been different, but I'm begging her and the editors to be more inclusive and not make every female character an asshole.
Rep: Russian gay mc, bi (?) Central Asian love interest
Okay, review after second reread with Varia: sadly my opinion of this book plunged. Varia is a lot more knowledgeable about Soviet life and customs (here's her review), so she picked up on a LOT more historical inaccuracies than I did. It feels very British in some parts, even the language used like "you wot mate" type of phrases which also threw me off in the audio (don't get me wrong, the narrator was lovely and I know he adopted the accent to show those people were from a different social class), but come on, man, this is not a London suburb.
I had to relive the Red Train chapter again which made me feel so icky and nauseated. Also all the weird gender/fake feminism. No, please no. And the ending, whyyyy.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Original review posted 28/06/2022
This book is polarising af, and I'm curious to see where Pulley stans will stand - I think it will largely depend on your background. I'm going to admit that my rating is the least objective one ever, and if it had been any other author, it would have been 3 stars at best.
Readers from Eastern Europe are going to feel weird af about this. Or at least I know I did. The writing is excellent, there's a wide variety of complex characters, it feels like the science was well-researched, but is it really appropriate to have a romance between a former gulag prisoner and a KGB boss? But even ignoring that, the gender stuff and the misogyny was cringy.
There's one weird part where Valery thinks about how titles like Mister are gendered and that it is as if people called each other by their genitals???? Huh???? Exact quote “every single person reminded every single time they were named of that one part of them that defined everything they were meant to be, and nobody ever seemed to sit back and say, but we would never call anyone Penis Harrison; how’s mister any different?”
Listen, I have a very limited understanding of Russian grammar, but it is not a genderless language? Especially when you'd have a distinction between Shenkov (the husband) and then Anna Shenkova...
Natasha Pulley must have heard me complain about misogyny in her previous books, because it's as if she's trying to be super feminist in this one, but it totally backfired. There was a huge emphasis on having women scientists, which is great, but since the whole book is from Valery's pov, it is odd some of the things he notices and mentions. Not saying women in Soviet Russia weren't more emancipated, but they were certainly not on equal status. The fact that Valery seems hyper aware of misogyny happening to his former mentor or to Anna... I don't know, it's kind of the author's way to wave at you and say how feminist they are, but it just trikes me as insincere. Also the constant reminders of how women in Russia have it better off than in the West... like okay, we get it? Not necessarily true, but whatever.
But also can we talk about how most of Pulley's female characters are mean hardasses? Grace, Agatha and now Rezovskaya (and Anna to a lesser extent), they all seem to be cut from the same ruthless cloth, and they are all eliminated in awful ways because they stand in the gay couple's way. I don't know if this is newsflash, but there is no need for these characters to be in the book? There's no reason for a woman to stand in their way... and honestly the ending made me feel incredibly queasy, because I honestly doubt Shenkov would have
Anyway, rant over. I appreciate the timing of this book is not great, and maybe if Natasha could have done more research on site it would have been different, but I'm begging her and the editors to be more inclusive and not make every female character an asshole.
Rep: Russian gay mc, bi (?) Central Asian love interest
May 6, 2024
DNF at around 60%.
So, I'm a massive fan of Pulley's books. Before this one, she was one of the few authors on my insta-buy list, and I'm sad to say she's come right off. I was taken by surprise, years ago, with how gorgeous and *gay* Watchmaker was, her blend of literary historical fiction, magical realism and queer stories that seemed to be flying under the radar of most queer fiction readers. I was shouting her praises from the rooftops! But, there were always weaknesses, and I think, five books into her career, we've hit a wall with her as an author. These waknesses are all the more apparent because they're in all five books now. and I feel like I'm going insane.
As much as I've sung her praises, I have a general bone to pick with cishet female authors who exclusively write Sad Gays because, well, it should be obvious. In the 2020s queer fiction should not still be dominated by outsiders looking in, licking their lips at the idea of sappy, delicate gay boys, writing about the experience like a disaster tourist, visiting this pain and joy and able to leave it behind at the airport and go about their lives.
But. I have been willing to overlook Pulley because she writes these sappy gay boys in the exact ways I like. She does it so well. In a genre that has become glutted with sunshine wholesome uwu gays, and authors that avoid writing any conflict at every turn and market their books as a 'warm cup of tea', she's provided the good for yearning, pining, aching capital R Romances that just - chef's fucking kiss - get me. But she's had some faults and missteps, sure, but ones that can so easily become rectified through solid feedback and editing. Yet she's let them become more and more entrenched with every book, I don't know why, and this was the book that broke me.
So, right. This book is about Valery Kolkhanov, a scientist who is taken out of the gulags to serve the rest of his sentence in a laboratory stationed in an isolated city where nothing seems quite right from the moment he arrives. It's instantly gripping, I love a good Cold War conspiracy story. It's more of a thriller than her previous magical realism novels, but promised to still queer at the centre, and I was so excited to see where this shift in genre was taking us.
It's a shame this book instead was a romance between two of the most loathsome, cowardly meow meows, featuring a story about the Soviet nuclear program's lack of human and environmental ethics, and Soviet mass surveillance and censorship that was written with with the tone and gravity of an episode of 'Allo 'Allo.
Let's start with... god, the glaring Englishness. Pulley has before added some egregious Britishisms to dialogue from characters from other cultures, see: The Lost Future of Pepperharrow. I'll give her this generosity, Pepperharrow had an explanation in the foreword - our POV character was a British man who had learned Japanese as a second language, so, feasibly, it could have been a novel where all the Japanese characters calling each other 'mate' was because this British man was parsing all conversations in his head as such. It was a choice that didn't work for me 100%, but I could see the logic.
Here, no dice. I have no idea while 1960s Soviets are calling each other 'chaps' and swearing 'bloody' and even talking about a room being Hoovered. Oh yeah there was definitely market for Hoover exports in 1960s Siberia are you fucking joking lmao. This speaks to me of an author absolutely incapable of, or too lazy to, get out of their own head and do the hard yards of worldbuilding and creating a sense of place. Which is wildly disappointing since she apparently did research and travelled to Siberia for this novel.
I'll say it's even more egregious, given the rise in Russian-flavoured fantasy novels in the past decade has led to a whole suite of criticism available to read on the depiction of Slavic cultures by Western European/American authors, to garner an insight on how vast the gap is between Russian culture and the Anglosphere. It's been made abundantly clear if you visit these spaces (which, judging from Pulley's twitter, she does) that Slavic countries aren't just Spicy Europe to sprinkle flavour into your novel (see Deathless, Shadow and Bone), and readers from these cultures are sick of this misrepresentation. Let alone the fact that we're still having to grapple with rampant Russophobia and the history of the Soviet Union, which has been doused in an ocean of propaganda and misinformation in the Anglosphere that continues to this day. Writing something about Russia from your comfortable English town comes with so much more baggage, is what I'm trying to say.
But more than that, it's just plain disappointing to see an author write historical fiction and not even try to immerse the reader. Why the hell am I even here then? I spent half my time reading the novel drawn into the suspenseful plot, then abruptly ejected when a KGB agent is calling someone 'mate' lmaooo. I didn't finish the book obviously but it sounds like one character sincerely sees 1960s England as a promised land without policy brutality and mass surveillance, which. Okay. Lmao. Just read any account of the Manchester scene in the 1960s, please come back and tell me how bright and glorious dear ol' England is.
But the most genuinely startling aspect of Pulley's Britishisms is that it also leans hard on a particular type of Dry Witty British humour. In this novel it sometimes works - a bit of gallows humour about the gulag, sure. But where it doesn't, the tonal dissonance is an absolute clunker and is so alarmingly bizarre.
The introduction of Doctor Josef Mengele into the novel was accompanied with a Black Books-esque farce of a scene, with the line 'I'm getting bored of this twin stuff!'. Talk about pulling me out of the novel, that sent me into another fucking astral plane propelled entirely out of pure shock. Josef fucking Mengele gets a cameo in this novel to share a quip. WHAT the fuck is WRONG with you.
The late 20th century's mass of Western sitcoms about some absolutely dark subject matter is a wild time from our current standpoint (Blackadder the Forth and 'Allo 'Allo, Hogan's Heroes, we can go on), but it was told by survivors of the war (and very often, of the concentration camps themselves). Pulley is a millennial British woman who frankly has no place being so glib and cheeky about these war crimes in her emotional gay novel.
Fiction doesn't have a responsibility for my comfort with certain subject matter, it doesn't owe me anything, but by god does it need to have a reason to be engaging with subject matter like, um, the Holocaust, and human experimentation, and state-sanctioned murder. And if the reason to include Josef fucking Mengele in your story is to be a prop for your poor meow meow gay man's backstory, I would appreciate for you to not be a fucking idiot about it.
And really, his has been a Thing in her books for a while (see: the love interest murdering a child in cold blood in The Kingdoms where it never really being addressed before or after our heroes get their HEA) which ties in nicely with my next bit of criticism about how another classic Pulleyism has manifested in this book: she comes close to making our male leads the kind of legitimately morally grey, complicated romantic protagonists I like to read about, except the writing really can't help but need to take the coward's way out. The pendulum swings hard back in the other direction in this book, trying ever so hard to make them deeply sympathetic, of the uwu soft boy variety. 'You're not a bad person for working on Dr Mengele's human experimentation, you were only 19!'our protagonist is told by his love interest, the KGB agent. Who is in turn told, it's okay you burned down a village and forcibly displaced people, you were - wait for it - just following orders, and you did it more nicely than other KGB agents. Again - what the FUCK is going on in Pulley's head.
It's condescending in one sense - trust us, Pulley, a lot of readers are okay with reading about complicated men doing morally apprehensible acts still receiving a satisfying romantic ending. If anyone reading this review is after a great example of this kind of story, give Amberlough a crack. But on the other hand, maybe next time don't try to very sincerely woobify like, a KGB agent who murders multiple people during the course of this book in the name of government sanctioned censorship, and a scientist who LITERALLY WORKED WITH MENGELE, our cultural shorthand for genocidal medical experimentation, I'm sorry, I cannot get over that part I feel like, I'm going INSANE. If 9 people sit down at a table with 1 Nazi without protest, then you have 10 Nazis. And that's one hell of a Nazi giving us a cheeky cameo in this novel. But won't worry bestiesssss there's a cute octopus :)
I really did enjoy the plot at the story, until the mystery became extremely clunkin' obvious to the point where I kept wondering if I had missed something? but no, all the characters were that dense. I hoped that the romance and character work would make up for it. But oh no, we had to linger on Valery's tragic backstory of being put in a gulag for having studied abroad (with, guess who, Josef Mengele) immediately followed up with him calling people who survived a forced displacement - you know, an act considered by international norms as genocide - as 'whingers'. Followed up with scenes of Valery cuddling with Shenkov, the only man who understands his uwu soft feelings, who is also a KGB agent - you know, the sharp tool of the ruling class, one of the mass of braindead bastards who sign up to be a fucking pig. I just felt like I was spiralling into derangement the more of this I read, and by all means it sounds like it didn't get better.
I think Pulley, as a white British woman, is trying really, earnestly hard to write anti-colonialist/imperialist stories with feminist bents and #diversity, but at the end of the day all I get from this writing is a fascination with the Other while still being comfortable with her place as a sightseer in these genuinely painful experiences. The glibness and dry humour isn't coming from a place where she's parsing her own pain and trauma - the writing has a distance that is genuinely unnerving, and I have no interest in reading about how uwu hard lives are for men who have happily participated in multiple genocides across Eurasia. See also: five books where all her male queer romances are also interracial (all but one with Asian men), without a single mention of lesbians, let alone a female character who comes off well.
Which brings us to, at last, the misogyny. Pulley yet again can only write one kind of female character (overly sensible, unemotional girlboss in STEM) and once again, for the third time, the wife dies so the men can be gay together. The former is the plague of the M/M genre since the mid-2010s, the latter has been the plague of the M/M genre since kingdom fucking come. I'm completely bored of it. The writing is providing an unfortunate insight into Pulley's id and her conception of what feminism is, and what a woman is. Men in her books are allowed to be complicated, violent, vulnerable, loving, selfless, guarded, devoted, paternal, self-serving, bold, anxious, yearning. Women are sensible, clinical, and obstacles in men's journeys to self-fulfilment.
I wish this book was able to own how horrific the main cast was. I hope Pulley's writing is able to grow and she doesn't feel the need to make readers 'grow a soft spot' for her 'morally grey' characters, and not feel the need to make them such when they've been complicit in two of the most infamous acts of war crimes and human rights abuse in the 20th century. It's at the point where I can't wait for her next novel starring an uwu soft British sinnamon roll on a research expedition in the Khmer Rouge. So, y'know, he can fall in love with an Asian guy. Like all her other novels.
There's authors who are formulaic, and I'll eat it up because I love reading how they draft up their forumlas and let them loose in a novel. But this one was just far too flippant with its frankly insane subject matter that it only speaks to ignorance and an incapability to really engage with the subject matter, and I'm too tired of the misogyny. I'm still a great fan of her previous books, but hope the next go shakes these things up because I don't think I can read another goddamn dead wife.
So, I'm a massive fan of Pulley's books. Before this one, she was one of the few authors on my insta-buy list, and I'm sad to say she's come right off. I was taken by surprise, years ago, with how gorgeous and *gay* Watchmaker was, her blend of literary historical fiction, magical realism and queer stories that seemed to be flying under the radar of most queer fiction readers. I was shouting her praises from the rooftops! But, there were always weaknesses, and I think, five books into her career, we've hit a wall with her as an author. These waknesses are all the more apparent because they're in all five books now. and I feel like I'm going insane.
As much as I've sung her praises, I have a general bone to pick with cishet female authors who exclusively write Sad Gays because, well, it should be obvious. In the 2020s queer fiction should not still be dominated by outsiders looking in, licking their lips at the idea of sappy, delicate gay boys, writing about the experience like a disaster tourist, visiting this pain and joy and able to leave it behind at the airport and go about their lives.
But. I have been willing to overlook Pulley because she writes these sappy gay boys in the exact ways I like. She does it so well. In a genre that has become glutted with sunshine wholesome uwu gays, and authors that avoid writing any conflict at every turn and market their books as a 'warm cup of tea', she's provided the good for yearning, pining, aching capital R Romances that just - chef's fucking kiss - get me. But she's had some faults and missteps, sure, but ones that can so easily become rectified through solid feedback and editing. Yet she's let them become more and more entrenched with every book, I don't know why, and this was the book that broke me.
So, right. This book is about Valery Kolkhanov, a scientist who is taken out of the gulags to serve the rest of his sentence in a laboratory stationed in an isolated city where nothing seems quite right from the moment he arrives. It's instantly gripping, I love a good Cold War conspiracy story. It's more of a thriller than her previous magical realism novels, but promised to still queer at the centre, and I was so excited to see where this shift in genre was taking us.
It's a shame this book instead was a romance between two of the most loathsome, cowardly meow meows, featuring a story about the Soviet nuclear program's lack of human and environmental ethics, and Soviet mass surveillance and censorship that was written with with the tone and gravity of an episode of 'Allo 'Allo.
Let's start with... god, the glaring Englishness. Pulley has before added some egregious Britishisms to dialogue from characters from other cultures, see: The Lost Future of Pepperharrow. I'll give her this generosity, Pepperharrow had an explanation in the foreword - our POV character was a British man who had learned Japanese as a second language, so, feasibly, it could have been a novel where all the Japanese characters calling each other 'mate' was because this British man was parsing all conversations in his head as such. It was a choice that didn't work for me 100%, but I could see the logic.
Here, no dice. I have no idea while 1960s Soviets are calling each other 'chaps' and swearing 'bloody' and even talking about a room being Hoovered. Oh yeah there was definitely market for Hoover exports in 1960s Siberia are you fucking joking lmao. This speaks to me of an author absolutely incapable of, or too lazy to, get out of their own head and do the hard yards of worldbuilding and creating a sense of place. Which is wildly disappointing since she apparently did research and travelled to Siberia for this novel.
I'll say it's even more egregious, given the rise in Russian-flavoured fantasy novels in the past decade has led to a whole suite of criticism available to read on the depiction of Slavic cultures by Western European/American authors, to garner an insight on how vast the gap is between Russian culture and the Anglosphere. It's been made abundantly clear if you visit these spaces (which, judging from Pulley's twitter, she does) that Slavic countries aren't just Spicy Europe to sprinkle flavour into your novel (see Deathless, Shadow and Bone), and readers from these cultures are sick of this misrepresentation. Let alone the fact that we're still having to grapple with rampant Russophobia and the history of the Soviet Union, which has been doused in an ocean of propaganda and misinformation in the Anglosphere that continues to this day. Writing something about Russia from your comfortable English town comes with so much more baggage, is what I'm trying to say.
But more than that, it's just plain disappointing to see an author write historical fiction and not even try to immerse the reader. Why the hell am I even here then? I spent half my time reading the novel drawn into the suspenseful plot, then abruptly ejected when a KGB agent is calling someone 'mate' lmaooo. I didn't finish the book obviously but it sounds like one character sincerely sees 1960s England as a promised land without policy brutality and mass surveillance, which. Okay. Lmao. Just read any account of the Manchester scene in the 1960s, please come back and tell me how bright and glorious dear ol' England is.
But the most genuinely startling aspect of Pulley's Britishisms is that it also leans hard on a particular type of Dry Witty British humour. In this novel it sometimes works - a bit of gallows humour about the gulag, sure. But where it doesn't, the tonal dissonance is an absolute clunker and is so alarmingly bizarre.
The introduction of Doctor Josef Mengele into the novel was accompanied with a Black Books-esque farce of a scene, with the line 'I'm getting bored of this twin stuff!'. Talk about pulling me out of the novel, that sent me into another fucking astral plane propelled entirely out of pure shock. Josef fucking Mengele gets a cameo in this novel to share a quip. WHAT the fuck is WRONG with you.
The late 20th century's mass of Western sitcoms about some absolutely dark subject matter is a wild time from our current standpoint (Blackadder the Forth and 'Allo 'Allo, Hogan's Heroes, we can go on), but it was told by survivors of the war (and very often, of the concentration camps themselves). Pulley is a millennial British woman who frankly has no place being so glib and cheeky about these war crimes in her emotional gay novel.
Fiction doesn't have a responsibility for my comfort with certain subject matter, it doesn't owe me anything, but by god does it need to have a reason to be engaging with subject matter like, um, the Holocaust, and human experimentation, and state-sanctioned murder. And if the reason to include Josef fucking Mengele in your story is to be a prop for your poor meow meow gay man's backstory, I would appreciate for you to not be a fucking idiot about it.
And really, his has been a Thing in her books for a while (see: the love interest murdering a child in cold blood in The Kingdoms where it never really being addressed before or after our heroes get their HEA) which ties in nicely with my next bit of criticism about how another classic Pulleyism has manifested in this book: she comes close to making our male leads the kind of legitimately morally grey, complicated romantic protagonists I like to read about, except the writing really can't help but need to take the coward's way out. The pendulum swings hard back in the other direction in this book, trying ever so hard to make them deeply sympathetic, of the uwu soft boy variety. 'You're not a bad person for working on Dr Mengele's human experimentation, you were only 19!'our protagonist is told by his love interest, the KGB agent. Who is in turn told, it's okay you burned down a village and forcibly displaced people, you were - wait for it - just following orders, and you did it more nicely than other KGB agents. Again - what the FUCK is going on in Pulley's head.
It's condescending in one sense - trust us, Pulley, a lot of readers are okay with reading about complicated men doing morally apprehensible acts still receiving a satisfying romantic ending. If anyone reading this review is after a great example of this kind of story, give Amberlough a crack. But on the other hand, maybe next time don't try to very sincerely woobify like, a KGB agent who murders multiple people during the course of this book in the name of government sanctioned censorship, and a scientist who LITERALLY WORKED WITH MENGELE, our cultural shorthand for genocidal medical experimentation, I'm sorry, I cannot get over that part I feel like, I'm going INSANE. If 9 people sit down at a table with 1 Nazi without protest, then you have 10 Nazis. And that's one hell of a Nazi giving us a cheeky cameo in this novel. But won't worry bestiesssss there's a cute octopus :)
I really did enjoy the plot at the story, until the mystery became extremely clunkin' obvious to the point where I kept wondering if I had missed something? but no, all the characters were that dense. I hoped that the romance and character work would make up for it. But oh no, we had to linger on Valery's tragic backstory of being put in a gulag for having studied abroad (with, guess who, Josef Mengele) immediately followed up with him calling people who survived a forced displacement - you know, an act considered by international norms as genocide - as 'whingers'. Followed up with scenes of Valery cuddling with Shenkov, the only man who understands his uwu soft feelings, who is also a KGB agent - you know, the sharp tool of the ruling class, one of the mass of braindead bastards who sign up to be a fucking pig. I just felt like I was spiralling into derangement the more of this I read, and by all means it sounds like it didn't get better.
I think Pulley, as a white British woman, is trying really, earnestly hard to write anti-colonialist/imperialist stories with feminist bents and #diversity, but at the end of the day all I get from this writing is a fascination with the Other while still being comfortable with her place as a sightseer in these genuinely painful experiences. The glibness and dry humour isn't coming from a place where she's parsing her own pain and trauma - the writing has a distance that is genuinely unnerving, and I have no interest in reading about how uwu hard lives are for men who have happily participated in multiple genocides across Eurasia. See also: five books where all her male queer romances are also interracial (all but one with Asian men), without a single mention of lesbians, let alone a female character who comes off well.
Which brings us to, at last, the misogyny. Pulley yet again can only write one kind of female character (overly sensible, unemotional girlboss in STEM) and once again, for the third time, the wife dies so the men can be gay together. The former is the plague of the M/M genre since the mid-2010s, the latter has been the plague of the M/M genre since kingdom fucking come. I'm completely bored of it. The writing is providing an unfortunate insight into Pulley's id and her conception of what feminism is, and what a woman is. Men in her books are allowed to be complicated, violent, vulnerable, loving, selfless, guarded, devoted, paternal, self-serving, bold, anxious, yearning. Women are sensible, clinical, and obstacles in men's journeys to self-fulfilment.
I wish this book was able to own how horrific the main cast was. I hope Pulley's writing is able to grow and she doesn't feel the need to make readers 'grow a soft spot' for her 'morally grey' characters, and not feel the need to make them such when they've been complicit in two of the most infamous acts of war crimes and human rights abuse in the 20th century. It's at the point where I can't wait for her next novel starring an uwu soft British sinnamon roll on a research expedition in the Khmer Rouge. So, y'know, he can fall in love with an Asian guy. Like all her other novels.
There's authors who are formulaic, and I'll eat it up because I love reading how they draft up their forumlas and let them loose in a novel. But this one was just far too flippant with its frankly insane subject matter that it only speaks to ignorance and an incapability to really engage with the subject matter, and I'm too tired of the misogyny. I'm still a great fan of her previous books, but hope the next go shakes these things up because I don't think I can read another goddamn dead wife.
August 18, 2022
Diversity win. The guy who worked with Josef Mengele(!) on his nazi human experimentations is gay!
No but he's sad about it of course, he's not a nazi, and it's just for a couple of months (not because he quit though, but because the war happened). It's for his degree. And he spends the whole book trying to save people. Does that make the whole nazi thing more palatable? the fuck no!
"If I were German, I’d have been condemned in the Nuremberg trials for what happened in those studies."
And oh the excuses Shenkov makes for him, "‘It wasn’t your fault. You were doing as you were told.’ throwing up. "You were just a child", I'm sorry but at nineteen you're not a kid, and if at nineteen your brain is developed enough to participate in human experimentations, then you're really not a kid.
Let's talk, Natasha Pulley is a white woman and she really wants you to know that. In all her books, her world views are at best cringy and naive at worst fucking disgusting. People read her books for the m/m romance, can't she just stick to that ? But the romance here is between a gulag prisoner and a KGB agent.... this is certainly a choice. A choice she chose to make.
And someone look at this quote:
"your idea of normal treatment is to be arrested, abused, beaten, and imprisoned for things that aren’t your fault, and which are not crimes. That doesn’t happen in England. I know that sounds like some fantastical decadence to you, but it is not. Some promised lands really are milk and honey." HAHAHAHAHAHA absolutely deranged
The plot of this book is not even well crafted, it's clearly far too ambitious for her writing abilities, thus relies too heavily on people being oblivious or flat out stupid. Her solution to the bugs hidden everywhere is turning the kettle on, then back on, then back on until the conversation is over. The agent listening must just think "damn the kettle is so loud, they must really like coffee." In other scenes, people don't turn on the kettle and I'm like but the bugs?
I'm not even talking about the inaccuracies, her treatment of female characters, the fucking weird scene at the end (help, what the fuck was that???), this is all very very bad.
No but he's sad about it of course, he's not a nazi, and it's just for a couple of months (not because he quit though, but because the war happened). It's for his degree. And he spends the whole book trying to save people. Does that make the whole nazi thing more palatable? the fuck no!
"If I were German, I’d have been condemned in the Nuremberg trials for what happened in those studies."
And oh the excuses Shenkov makes for him, "‘It wasn’t your fault. You were doing as you were told.’ throwing up. "You were just a child", I'm sorry but at nineteen you're not a kid, and if at nineteen your brain is developed enough to participate in human experimentations, then you're really not a kid.
Let's talk, Natasha Pulley is a white woman and she really wants you to know that. In all her books, her world views are at best cringy and naive at worst fucking disgusting. People read her books for the m/m romance, can't she just stick to that ? But the romance here is between a gulag prisoner and a KGB agent.... this is certainly a choice. A choice she chose to make.
And someone look at this quote:
"your idea of normal treatment is to be arrested, abused, beaten, and imprisoned for things that aren’t your fault, and which are not crimes. That doesn’t happen in England. I know that sounds like some fantastical decadence to you, but it is not. Some promised lands really are milk and honey." HAHAHAHAHAHA absolutely deranged
The plot of this book is not even well crafted, it's clearly far too ambitious for her writing abilities, thus relies too heavily on people being oblivious or flat out stupid. Her solution to the bugs hidden everywhere is turning the kettle on, then back on, then back on until the conversation is over. The agent listening must just think "damn the kettle is so loud, they must really like coffee." In other scenes, people don't turn on the kettle and I'm like but the bugs?
I'm not even talking about the inaccuracies, her treatment of female characters, the fucking weird scene at the end (help, what the fuck was that???), this is all very very bad.
December 14, 2022
Valery Kolkhanov is six years into a ten-year sentence at a Soviet gulag when he is transferred to work at a lab at the mysterious City 40: a small city in the middle of an irradiated marsh, home to five nuclear reactors and a thousand secrets. Conditions at City 40 are infinitely better than the gulag, but there’s something very wrong going on at City 40: rumors about a strange explosion six years ago, radiation charts that bear no correlation with reality, and an intentional lack of radiation equipment. But asking questions is a dangerous proposition in the Soviet Union, and some secrets are meant to stay hidden.
WELCOME BACK TO NATASHA PULLEY LAND, WHERE EVERYTHING HURTS!
At this point, Pulley has a very specific formula. If you liked her previous books, you will love this one. If you didn’t like her previous books, this probably won’t be your cup of tea. I happen to adore her books, so this was extremely up my alley and had me staying up past any reasonable bedtime because I couldn’t put the book down.
I could go on about why I love Pulley’s specific formula: her focus on small kindnesses in the face of immense cruelty and coldness; her masterful building of tension and suspense; the way she builds a relationship on the smallest, subtlest moments and gestures into something grand and beautiful and breathtaking; her penchant for really, really interesting historical settings; how all her books include adorably anthropomorphic animals (I am overjoyed to announce that we have another octopus in this book, his name is Albert and I love him). But I’ve talked about all those things in other Pulley book reviews, so I’m going to attempt to not be repetitive.
Pulley has long had an issue with casting her female characters as villains, or at least roadblocks for the protagonists. It’s a perfectly fine trope to pull once, but she’s used it in all her books except The Bedlam Stacks. I’m really pleased to say that Pulley has finally course corrected here! Not that there aren’t any female villains, but there are a lot of female characters in general and they come in a variety of flavors and personalities. It’s a refreshing addition of balance to the book, and one Pulley really needed.
One of Pulley’s favorite tropes are characters with good moral cores who have been put in situations where they feel, rightly or wrongly, that their only course of action is to cause pain and hurt. That trope is turned up to eleven in this book, as is appropriate for a novel about radiation experiments in Soviet Russia. With the Cold War raging, the stakes have never been higher for Soviet scientists. Radiation experiments could discover ways to mitigate or even cure radiation poisoning, saving millions of lives if the US ever nukes the Soviet Union. But radiation experiments can only be effective if a fair amount of ethics are thrown out the window. Is it worth harming some to save many? Where is the line?
It’s a line that’s both fuzzy and constantly shifting for many of the characters, and it raises questions of culpability and judgement. Is it evil to put the potential needs of many ahead of the very real needs of a few? Does that math change if “many” is measured in millions and “few” is measured in thousands? Does the fact that we know in the modern day that most of the results of these radiation experiments were useless render those decisions and that math less moral in hindsight?
These are not easy questions to answer, and not ones Pulley even begins to attempt to answer. Her characters are morally compromised, and they know it, and they hate it. It tortures them, what they’ve done. But they also still did those things. And despite those cruelties, despite how cold and awful the grinding machine of society is, her characters still find space for kindness. In Pulley’s world, kindness is the ultimate saving grace.
I imagine more than a few readers will be turned off by the moral compromises the more sympathetic characters make, and I get it. But I don’t think Pulley is condoning anyone’s behavior – far from it. Rather, she presents situations in which good people make really awful decisions and explains how they get to those decisions. No one is off the hook here.
Side note: Pulley’s original title, Rust Country, was a hell of a lot better than The Half Life of Valery K. But book trends are a thing, so I understand why the publisher pushed for it. Please shelve this book next to The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August and all the other The X Lives of Y books.
I always come out of a Natasha Pulley book feeling like my heart has grown several sizes to better accommodate all the emotions the book has summoned in me. She has such a magical way with words, and her full talents are on display here. This book is a real gem, and a worthy successor to Pulley’s absolute masterpiece The Kingdoms. I want to spend ten hours on Wikipedia reading about radiation, and I want to reread this book immediately so I can feel everything all over again.
(Note from Miriam in the future: I did in fact reread this book immediately.)
I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for a fair and honest review.
---
Review to come. This was extremely excellent.
---
Edit: HOLY GOD ON A TOASTER NetGalley gave me an ARC!!
---
In the space of about a year, I have gone from "Natasha who?" to "I will pay cash for anything this woman publishes, no questions asked".
WELCOME BACK TO NATASHA PULLEY LAND, WHERE EVERYTHING HURTS!
At this point, Pulley has a very specific formula. If you liked her previous books, you will love this one. If you didn’t like her previous books, this probably won’t be your cup of tea. I happen to adore her books, so this was extremely up my alley and had me staying up past any reasonable bedtime because I couldn’t put the book down.
I could go on about why I love Pulley’s specific formula: her focus on small kindnesses in the face of immense cruelty and coldness; her masterful building of tension and suspense; the way she builds a relationship on the smallest, subtlest moments and gestures into something grand and beautiful and breathtaking; her penchant for really, really interesting historical settings; how all her books include adorably anthropomorphic animals (I am overjoyed to announce that we have another octopus in this book, his name is Albert and I love him). But I’ve talked about all those things in other Pulley book reviews, so I’m going to attempt to not be repetitive.
Pulley has long had an issue with casting her female characters as villains, or at least roadblocks for the protagonists. It’s a perfectly fine trope to pull once, but she’s used it in all her books except The Bedlam Stacks. I’m really pleased to say that Pulley has finally course corrected here! Not that there aren’t any female villains, but there are a lot of female characters in general and they come in a variety of flavors and personalities. It’s a refreshing addition of balance to the book, and one Pulley really needed.
One of Pulley’s favorite tropes are characters with good moral cores who have been put in situations where they feel, rightly or wrongly, that their only course of action is to cause pain and hurt. That trope is turned up to eleven in this book, as is appropriate for a novel about radiation experiments in Soviet Russia. With the Cold War raging, the stakes have never been higher for Soviet scientists. Radiation experiments could discover ways to mitigate or even cure radiation poisoning, saving millions of lives if the US ever nukes the Soviet Union. But radiation experiments can only be effective if a fair amount of ethics are thrown out the window. Is it worth harming some to save many? Where is the line?
It’s a line that’s both fuzzy and constantly shifting for many of the characters, and it raises questions of culpability and judgement. Is it evil to put the potential needs of many ahead of the very real needs of a few? Does that math change if “many” is measured in millions and “few” is measured in thousands? Does the fact that we know in the modern day that most of the results of these radiation experiments were useless render those decisions and that math less moral in hindsight?
These are not easy questions to answer, and not ones Pulley even begins to attempt to answer. Her characters are morally compromised, and they know it, and they hate it. It tortures them, what they’ve done. But they also still did those things. And despite those cruelties, despite how cold and awful the grinding machine of society is, her characters still find space for kindness. In Pulley’s world, kindness is the ultimate saving grace.
I imagine more than a few readers will be turned off by the moral compromises the more sympathetic characters make, and I get it. But I don’t think Pulley is condoning anyone’s behavior – far from it. Rather, she presents situations in which good people make really awful decisions and explains how they get to those decisions. No one is off the hook here.
Side note: Pulley’s original title, Rust Country, was a hell of a lot better than The Half Life of Valery K. But book trends are a thing, so I understand why the publisher pushed for it. Please shelve this book next to The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August and all the other The X Lives of Y books.
I always come out of a Natasha Pulley book feeling like my heart has grown several sizes to better accommodate all the emotions the book has summoned in me. She has such a magical way with words, and her full talents are on display here. This book is a real gem, and a worthy successor to Pulley’s absolute masterpiece The Kingdoms. I want to spend ten hours on Wikipedia reading about radiation, and I want to reread this book immediately so I can feel everything all over again.
(Note from Miriam in the future: I did in fact reread this book immediately.)
I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for a fair and honest review.
---
Review to come. This was extremely excellent.
---
Edit: HOLY GOD ON A TOASTER NetGalley gave me an ARC!!
---
In the space of about a year, I have gone from "Natasha who?" to "I will pay cash for anything this woman publishes, no questions asked".
July 31, 2022
i have never written an actual review before so forgive how terribly written this is but
FULL SPOILERS :
1. BRUH
I donot understand the POINT of this book. What was the point? We read about actual real life horrific things that have happened to actual real life people and we get that absolute deranged ending ??? I cant believe how absolutely insentive this book was while dealing with such an insensitive topic
Not only does our main character meet Dr Mengele and work with him but his actions are EXCUSED in text by his love interest and brushed aside ? "sorry pal you took part in one of the most inhumane acts in human history but its okay because you're 19 and a little silly???" WHAT.THE.ABSOLUTE.FUCKERY WAS THAT
I just cant like or sympathise OR feel sorry or ANYTHING for a character who took part in it I am sorry , no matter how sorry he feels for it or how much the author tries to pass it as naievity .
I donot like how the book was sympathetic towards a KGB officer and someone who fucking voluntarily took part in human experimentation and tried to pass it off as 'following orders,no other choice' . It feels so WRONG , this argument is so WRONG plus they DID have a choice.
I love morally gray characters , I loved Kite , I loved Mori and I fully expected to love Valery and Shenkov but this moral justification of heinous crimes is absolutely deranged
2. WOMEN
I just want to know WHY. Why would you write someone as wonderfull as Anna and try to pass her off as an inhuman person with no feelings .I think she was my favourite character in books but i was incredibly frustrated with how Pulley cant write women in stem without trying to make them some sort of ultra feminist unfeeling non motherly non womanly robot. First Agatha , then Grace and now Anna. COME ON. And I was incredibly pissed off with how she just killed Anna and the kids off and we got almost no reaction from Shenkov other than 'yeah wives die, children die, things happen , strawberry and champagne blah blah' . BITCH FUCKER!?!?!
I wanted more of the kids , I wanted more of the women because atleast if the men were not only morally depraved but horribly characterised there would be something for me to latch on but no....
Also lets talk about no.1 fucker ,sorry i mean feminist Valery. The scene where those women were gang raped and then Valery blows the men up because feminism . I donot have the vocabulary or mental capacity to explain why i hated this scene and why i think it was so wrong and i wished pulley didnt write it. It certainly didnt achieve what it was trying to do, to endear valery as a fellow woman lover. No, far from it.
3. PERSONAL FEELINGS
Even excluding these above mentioned plot atrocities this book was just.... a big flop honestly . It did not emotionally rile me up , it did not make me feel ANYTHING. I was having a panic attack reading Pepperharrow , I cried my eyes out reading Kingdoms but this book was just emotionless . I did not care for Valery , there was nothing in Shenkovs characterisation that even remotely made him interesting or made me care for him. Them together was kind of cute and that is the only reason why I am not giving this book 1 star. But their relationship did not have the bond thanielmori or joe and kite had . I simply did not feel their relationship had any substance or ups and downs , which is quite funny because the setting provided every opportunity for pulley to absolutely wreck me with these characters. There were one or two instances of quiet grief that reminded me of how i felt about Thaniel and Joe but that was it honestly . I just felt the characters were empty and lacking and they didnt have an ounce of what other Pulley couples possess. I remember tearing up reading just about Thaniel and Mori sitting together and working on a bench , i felt none of that choked up emotion or the numbness and grief that I have come to associate with pulley books with this
short summary of what i said :
this book is too problematic and made me angry , pulley easily brushes up over sensitive topics that are actual real world events and i did not care for the characters , they're not even 5% as well written as the other pulley characters and i absolutely did not care for them
FULL SPOILERS :
1. BRUH
I donot understand the POINT of this book. What was the point? We read about actual real life horrific things that have happened to actual real life people and we get that absolute deranged ending ??? I cant believe how absolutely insentive this book was while dealing with such an insensitive topic
Not only does our main character meet Dr Mengele and work with him but his actions are EXCUSED in text by his love interest and brushed aside ? "sorry pal you took part in one of the most inhumane acts in human history but its okay because you're 19 and a little silly???" WHAT.THE.ABSOLUTE.FUCKERY WAS THAT
I just cant like or sympathise OR feel sorry or ANYTHING for a character who took part in it I am sorry , no matter how sorry he feels for it or how much the author tries to pass it as naievity .
I donot like how the book was sympathetic towards a KGB officer and someone who fucking voluntarily took part in human experimentation and tried to pass it off as 'following orders,no other choice' . It feels so WRONG , this argument is so WRONG plus they DID have a choice.
I love morally gray characters , I loved Kite , I loved Mori and I fully expected to love Valery and Shenkov but this moral justification of heinous crimes is absolutely deranged
2. WOMEN
I just want to know WHY. Why would you write someone as wonderfull as Anna and try to pass her off as an inhuman person with no feelings .I think she was my favourite character in books but i was incredibly frustrated with how Pulley cant write women in stem without trying to make them some sort of ultra feminist unfeeling non motherly non womanly robot. First Agatha , then Grace and now Anna. COME ON. And I was incredibly pissed off with how she just killed Anna and the kids off and we got almost no reaction from Shenkov other than 'yeah wives die, children die, things happen , strawberry and champagne blah blah' . BITCH FUCKER!?!?!
I wanted more of the kids , I wanted more of the women because atleast if the men were not only morally depraved but horribly characterised there would be something for me to latch on but no....
Also lets talk about no.1 fucker ,sorry i mean feminist Valery. The scene where those women were gang raped and then Valery blows the men up because feminism . I donot have the vocabulary or mental capacity to explain why i hated this scene and why i think it was so wrong and i wished pulley didnt write it. It certainly didnt achieve what it was trying to do, to endear valery as a fellow woman lover. No, far from it.
3. PERSONAL FEELINGS
Even excluding these above mentioned plot atrocities this book was just.... a big flop honestly . It did not emotionally rile me up , it did not make me feel ANYTHING. I was having a panic attack reading Pepperharrow , I cried my eyes out reading Kingdoms but this book was just emotionless . I did not care for Valery , there was nothing in Shenkovs characterisation that even remotely made him interesting or made me care for him. Them together was kind of cute and that is the only reason why I am not giving this book 1 star. But their relationship did not have the bond thanielmori or joe and kite had . I simply did not feel their relationship had any substance or ups and downs , which is quite funny because the setting provided every opportunity for pulley to absolutely wreck me with these characters. There were one or two instances of quiet grief that reminded me of how i felt about Thaniel and Joe but that was it honestly . I just felt the characters were empty and lacking and they didnt have an ounce of what other Pulley couples possess. I remember tearing up reading just about Thaniel and Mori sitting together and working on a bench , i felt none of that choked up emotion or the numbness and grief that I have come to associate with pulley books with this
short summary of what i said :
this book is too problematic and made me angry , pulley easily brushes up over sensitive topics that are actual real world events and i did not care for the characters , they're not even 5% as well written as the other pulley characters and i absolutely did not care for them
March 7, 2023
Still processing this, but I expect like other Natasha Pulley books, I will probably not ever finish processing it, so I might as well post now. Here goes, not totally processed, and partial and rambling.
I was commenting I did not know what genre-tags to assign this book to (this a precious concern of mine, I should get over it though it does help me to find things even in lists), and Urwa said its genre is "Natasha Pulley novel". Yep. Precisely. I ended up going with historical fiction, and mm, and fantasy, because what the heck. It is as historical as most historical fiction with invented characters, mm because it is a Natasha Pulley novel (it is there), and fantasy because the octopus could not be possibly really be that cute that, right? And it feels magical even if there is no explicit magic.
I have read 4 of her 5 published novels since March, less than 9 months (and I got the 5th one but I am kind of saving it as a treat), so her novels do work, and very well, for me, even if I keep thinking "wow, yes, yes, but that bit does not make sense!" about so many things. (Incidentally if you never read any of her books and want to, start with The Kingdoms which is, IMO, a mess but it is a glorious, dramatic, grand, atmospheric, non cookie-cutter original page turning mess and total example of everything right, and wrong, with her writing).
So this is a Natasha Pulley novel, we got that out of the way, and that means very readable and page turning, very sympathetic slow-burn male-male relationship, a LOT of suffering in the background (but not hopelessly for our main characters), some pretty good stuff related to science actually , cute details, grand plots with drama amped to the max (or past it). And a few other things, some of which might be almost kinks .
This time set in a Soviet plutonium facility in the 60s, a scientist just picked up from a gulag camp and a KGB director and biological radiation studies, and this is about their relationship, their backgrounds and the mystery of excess, very excessive, background radiation. A lot of research (though I do not make any sense of "Land Rover", was it a placeholder meant to be later replaced by its soviet equivalent and she just never researched that to edit?), a lot of very interesting details, a lot of insightful things. But also a mess in many ways, as for example (partial list, there is more):
So in all (IMO and just mine, obviously) it is flawed -almost maybe like a draft of a book, which is not always consistent with itself, filled with ideas, and drama but maybe too much of those. Still I really really enjoyed so much of it and I will be in line to read her next book (which much I am looking forward to it, I hope is a bit more consistent. Come on - 53 mentioned all the time, but I only count 49!).
Incidentally I was reading this while a breakthrough in nuclear fusion tech is making the news, which added extra poignancy to this read. (Though I have certainly heard about lots of breakthroughs, oh yeah even cold fusion, throughout my life. Maybe one day....)
I was commenting I did not know what genre-tags to assign this book to (this a precious concern of mine, I should get over it though it does help me to find things even in lists), and Urwa said its genre is "Natasha Pulley novel". Yep. Precisely. I ended up going with historical fiction, and mm, and fantasy, because what the heck. It is as historical as most historical fiction with invented characters, mm because it is a Natasha Pulley novel (it is there), and fantasy because the octopus could not be possibly really be that cute that, right? And it feels magical even if there is no explicit magic.
I have read 4 of her 5 published novels since March, less than 9 months (and I got the 5th one but I am kind of saving it as a treat), so her novels do work, and very well, for me, even if I keep thinking "wow, yes, yes, but that bit does not make sense!" about so many things. (Incidentally if you never read any of her books and want to, start with The Kingdoms which is, IMO, a mess but it is a glorious, dramatic, grand, atmospheric, non cookie-cutter original page turning mess and total example of everything right, and wrong, with her writing).
So this is a Natasha Pulley novel, we got that out of the way, and that means very readable and page turning, very sympathetic slow-burn male-male relationship, a LOT of suffering in the background (but not hopelessly for our main characters), some pretty good stuff related to science actually , cute details, grand plots with drama amped to the max (or past it). And a few other things, some of which might be almost kinks .
This time set in a Soviet plutonium facility in the 60s, a scientist just picked up from a gulag camp and a KGB director and biological radiation studies, and this is about their relationship, their backgrounds and the mystery of excess, very excessive, background radiation. A lot of research (though I do not make any sense of "Land Rover", was it a placeholder meant to be later replaced by its soviet equivalent and she just never researched that to edit?), a lot of very interesting details, a lot of insightful things. But also a mess in many ways, as for example (partial list, there is more):
So in all (IMO and just mine, obviously) it is flawed -almost maybe like a draft of a book, which is not always consistent with itself, filled with ideas, and drama but maybe too much of those. Still I really really enjoyed so much of it and I will be in line to read her next book (which much I am looking forward to it, I hope is a bit more consistent. Come on - 53 mentioned all the time, but I only count 49!).
Incidentally I was reading this while a breakthrough in nuclear fusion tech is making the news, which added extra poignancy to this read. (Though I have certainly heard about lots of breakthroughs, oh yeah even cold fusion, throughout my life. Maybe one day....)
March 6, 2022
Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC
Content Warnings:
Natasha Pulley's latest is a difficult novel to classify – maybe historical thriller with elements of MM romance. The setting is the aftermath of a real historical incident - the 1957 Kyshtym disaster, a nuclear accident equivalent to Chernobyl that was concealed from the world for many years. The overall theme of the book is what sacrifices should be made by individuals for the good of the many. The protagonist, Valery, is plucked from the Gulag and sent to help with research at Chelyabinsk 40, a closed city in Russia that housed a nuclear power plant making weapons-grade plutonium. Once there, Valery, along with the head of security, Shenkov, uncover layers of conspiracy.
This book was surprisingly easy to ready for such grim subject matter. The narrative voice is whimsical and engaging and I will certainly be going back through the author's catalogue and reading her other novels that aren't so dark. There were also some lovely pieces of characterization throughout - Valery keeping the postage stamp as he leaves the Gulag comes to mind. Additionally, Pulley has clearly done a lot of research, both into the history and the science and I particularly enjoyed her explanations of scientific phenomena.
However, it felt like the writing was just a band aid for the larger issues this book had, both in plotting and in subject matter
Note: the following contains plot spoilers.
Content Warnings:
Natasha Pulley's latest is a difficult novel to classify – maybe historical thriller with elements of MM romance. The setting is the aftermath of a real historical incident - the 1957 Kyshtym disaster, a nuclear accident equivalent to Chernobyl that was concealed from the world for many years. The overall theme of the book is what sacrifices should be made by individuals for the good of the many. The protagonist, Valery, is plucked from the Gulag and sent to help with research at Chelyabinsk 40, a closed city in Russia that housed a nuclear power plant making weapons-grade plutonium. Once there, Valery, along with the head of security, Shenkov, uncover layers of conspiracy.
This book was surprisingly easy to ready for such grim subject matter. The narrative voice is whimsical and engaging and I will certainly be going back through the author's catalogue and reading her other novels that aren't so dark. There were also some lovely pieces of characterization throughout - Valery keeping the postage stamp as he leaves the Gulag comes to mind. Additionally, Pulley has clearly done a lot of research, both into the history and the science and I particularly enjoyed her explanations of scientific phenomena.
However, it felt like the writing was just a band aid for the larger issues this book had, both in plotting and in subject matter
Note: the following contains plot spoilers.
September 8, 2024
My wife and I like to listen to audiobooks together. This mostly means "listen over breakfast on the weekends" since our schedules don't mesh well for book-listening purposes. The audiobook of The Half Life of Valery K is over twelve and a half hours long. We started it on Saturday, August 31, and finished it on Friday, September 6, which is to say approximately six weeks sooner than we would have expected, and then this morning we listened to the last chapter again because we both had a book hangover so bad we didn't know what else to do with ourselves.
So, I tagged this "moral injury" and "morally gray and then some," and I know from glancing at a few negative reviews that many readers can't find it in themselves to sympathize with Valery and Shenkov. It's possible that had I not listened to Timothy Snyder's book Bloodlands earlier this year I'd have felt the same way, but Bloodlands brought home to me, as no other history of the region and era has, how impossible survival would have been without significant moral compromise and how many people were both victims and perpetrators, both simultaneously and in turn. Thus with Valery Kolkhanov and Konstantin Shenkov, two people whose fundamental impulses are to care and generosity, even -- and especially in Valery's case, I think -- to heroism, but who live in a time and a place where even attempts to do the right thing, or to protect someone you love, are liable to find you behaving monstrously. Sauve qui peut: what a world. "Sometimes it's champagne and strawberries, and sometimes ..."
(In other words, if you hated this book and wanted Valery and Kostya to die in a fire, I'm not interested in hearing about it.)
Anna Shenkovna, Albert the Octopus (Natasha Pulley really likes octopuses!), Tatiana Shenkovna, Svetlana, and Nanya (sp? the pitfalls of listening rather than reading) the engineer all deserve special mention too. Also the love confessions, both of which had me sobbing into the tissues my wife had shoved at me. (K.J. Charles fans will know what I mean when I say they were right up there with Will's in Subtle Blood, only heartrending.)
The more Natasha Pulley I read, the more impressed I am with her willingness to risk readers' anger by inviting us to identify with, and care deeply about, appealing characters who do terrible things. Watch the way she introduces Valery in the first chapter, and marvel.
ETA: Jot Davies, the narrator, is superb.
So, I tagged this "moral injury" and "morally gray and then some," and I know from glancing at a few negative reviews that many readers can't find it in themselves to sympathize with Valery and Shenkov. It's possible that had I not listened to Timothy Snyder's book Bloodlands earlier this year I'd have felt the same way, but Bloodlands brought home to me, as no other history of the region and era has, how impossible survival would have been without significant moral compromise and how many people were both victims and perpetrators, both simultaneously and in turn. Thus with Valery Kolkhanov and Konstantin Shenkov, two people whose fundamental impulses are to care and generosity, even -- and especially in Valery's case, I think -- to heroism, but who live in a time and a place where even attempts to do the right thing, or to protect someone you love, are liable to find you behaving monstrously. Sauve qui peut: what a world. "Sometimes it's champagne and strawberries, and sometimes ..."
(In other words, if you hated this book and wanted Valery and Kostya to die in a fire, I'm not interested in hearing about it.)
Anna Shenkovna, Albert the Octopus (Natasha Pulley really likes octopuses!), Tatiana Shenkovna, Svetlana, and Nanya (sp? the pitfalls of listening rather than reading) the engineer all deserve special mention too. Also the love confessions, both of which had me sobbing into the tissues my wife had shoved at me. (K.J. Charles fans will know what I mean when I say they were right up there with Will's in Subtle Blood, only heartrending.)
The more Natasha Pulley I read, the more impressed I am with her willingness to risk readers' anger by inviting us to identify with, and care deeply about, appealing characters who do terrible things. Watch the way she introduces Valery in the first chapter, and marvel.
ETA: Jot Davies, the narrator, is superb.
March 9, 2022
Excellent Soviet-era historical fiction with a very compelling main character, this was a great read albeit quite depressing (especially in hindsight as Pulley makes it clear in the afterword that this is very heavily based in reality).
Valery, the protagonist, is a specialist in the effects of radioactive materials on biology and gets pulled from the gulag to work in the mysterious City 40, a city that has been cut off from the rest of the world in order to study the effects of radiation on a completely irradiated ecosystem. But there's something not quite right about the radioactivity heat map provided by the scientists/KGB overseeing the site, and Valery is determined to to figure out what's really going on and sound the alarm bells.
I really loved Valery as a protagonist and thought Pulley did a great job of creating a character with a troubled past trying to work through his own issues while also working through a rather large main plot. I was also a big fan of Shenkov and enjoyed watching the relationship between the two characters change and grow. There's also a great cast of side characters throughout the book.
The plot is well-paced throughout and even when there were chapters flashing-back in time I never felt like the plot wasn't moving along, and all of the major plot points were compelling. I also really liked the way Pulley tied things up at the end. She had also clearly done quite a lot of research into the setting and it felt very realistic while I was reading it.
I did have a couple of very minor nitpicks with word-choices a couple of times but overall it was a fantastic read and definitely makes me keen to go back and read Pulley's previously published worked.
Oh, and special shout-out to Albert the octopus for bringing some delightful levity to the book!
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with an advanced review copy!
Valery, the protagonist, is a specialist in the effects of radioactive materials on biology and gets pulled from the gulag to work in the mysterious City 40, a city that has been cut off from the rest of the world in order to study the effects of radiation on a completely irradiated ecosystem. But there's something not quite right about the radioactivity heat map provided by the scientists/KGB overseeing the site, and Valery is determined to to figure out what's really going on and sound the alarm bells.
I really loved Valery as a protagonist and thought Pulley did a great job of creating a character with a troubled past trying to work through his own issues while also working through a rather large main plot. I was also a big fan of Shenkov and enjoyed watching the relationship between the two characters change and grow. There's also a great cast of side characters throughout the book.
The plot is well-paced throughout and even when there were chapters flashing-back in time I never felt like the plot wasn't moving along, and all of the major plot points were compelling. I also really liked the way Pulley tied things up at the end. She had also clearly done quite a lot of research into the setting and it felt very realistic while I was reading it.
I did have a couple of very minor nitpicks with word-choices a couple of times but overall it was a fantastic read and definitely makes me keen to go back and read Pulley's previously published worked.
Oh, and special shout-out to Albert the octopus for bringing some delightful levity to the book!
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with an advanced review copy!
July 29, 2022
Listen. LISTEN.
What the actual fuck is wrong with the author.
I’ve liked all her other books so I’m not a regular hater or opposed to a morally grey character. But like….for comparison… the love interest in Kingdoms killed an annoying child. The main character in this book PARTICIPATED IN THE HOLOCAUST.
Why - WHY - did the main character need to work with MENGELE in a flashback. And it’s totally glossed over because he the main character was 19 and ya know just a little guy. Are you fucking serious, my dude?! The way this was revealed was also bonkers and not at all subtle or smart or whatever the fuck the author was going for. He’s introduced as just Joe. And then a page later it’s like yes, Joe, JOE MENGELE.
The dialogue in this book was also just tonally all over the place given the events happening in the plot. At one point the main character says “I’m just a little science elf” TO A KGB AGENT. Bro, what?! I felt INSANE.
And this is neither here nor there, but it’s getting weird that the antagonists of all her novels are heartless women meanwhile the men are the true feminists. Also, specifically in this book, if the only fat people are villains or inept maybe reflect on that! I don’t know what’s going on over there in the UK/TERF Island for the author to be doing this consciously or subconsciously, but go workout your shit in therapy instead of making it your readers’ problem.
What the actual fuck is wrong with the author.
I’ve liked all her other books so I’m not a regular hater or opposed to a morally grey character. But like….for comparison… the love interest in Kingdoms killed an annoying child. The main character in this book PARTICIPATED IN THE HOLOCAUST.
Why - WHY - did the main character need to work with MENGELE in a flashback. And it’s totally glossed over because he the main character was 19 and ya know just a little guy. Are you fucking serious, my dude?! The way this was revealed was also bonkers and not at all subtle or smart or whatever the fuck the author was going for. He’s introduced as just Joe. And then a page later it’s like yes, Joe, JOE MENGELE.
The dialogue in this book was also just tonally all over the place given the events happening in the plot. At one point the main character says “I’m just a little science elf” TO A KGB AGENT. Bro, what?! I felt INSANE.
And this is neither here nor there, but it’s getting weird that the antagonists of all her novels are heartless women meanwhile the men are the true feminists. Also, specifically in this book, if the only fat people are villains or inept maybe reflect on that! I don’t know what’s going on over there in the UK/TERF Island for the author to be doing this consciously or subconsciously, but go workout your shit in therapy instead of making it your readers’ problem.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,123 reviews