The Revolution of Marina M.

September 11, 2017
In a break with her contemporary fiction, Fitch (White Oleander) has written an epic bildungsroman about a girl who lives through the Russian Revolution. In 1916 Petrograd, 16-year-old Marina Dmitrievna Makarova is an aspiring poet from a well-to-do background. Through her eyes, readers see the deprivations caused by World War I, the ouster of the czar, and the rise of the Bolsheviks. She loses her virginity to a friend, Kolya Shurov, on leave from his regiment, and falls in love with an impoverished fellow poet, Gena Kuriakin. With her friends, Jewish Mina and radical Varvara, she is swept up in the first wave of revolutionary fervor, for which her father kicks her out of the house. After a series of misadventures, including sexual enslavement, passing herself off as a boy, and running off with Kolya (now an enemy of the state), Marina finally finds sanctuary at her family’s country estate, which has been taken over by a spiritualist cult. The resilient Marina has much in common with the modern heroines of the author’s previous books and is a protagonist worth following. However, even though the book is well researched, the overlong narrative peters out.

July 1, 2017

Marking the centenary of the 1917 Russian Revolution comes Fitch's third adult novel. Can it achieve the blockbuster status of her White Oleander and Paint It Black? Teenager Marina Makarova is blessed with privilege and a talent for writing poetry. She hangs with literary futurists in Petrograd (St. Petersburg) and buys into their views of the failing tsarist regime. As successive governments crumble and the German war machine advances, she lives in the heart of the city's collapse. Her survival instincts pushed to just short of death, she finds her inner shapeshifter and wriggles out of trouble to fight another day. In the sweep and heft of her tribute to St. Petersburg's suffering during the years 1916-19, Fitch captures the epic grandeur of Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, situating her characters in the pages of authentic history. Yet she also infuses her protagonists with transgressive sexual energy a la E.L. James's Fifty Shades of Grey, vividly portraying 16-year-old Marina's sexual awakenings as she falls in and out of love. As a college student, Fitch concentrated on Russian studies, and she treats the facts with a historian's respect. Especially well done is the story line dealing with the vicious Cheka, the Soviet secret police. VERDICT Readers of Tolstoy, Boris Pasternak, and Margaret Mitchell will thrill to this narrative of women in love during the cataclysm of war. [See Prepub Alert, 5/15/17.]--Barbara Conaty, Falls Church, VA

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 15, 2017
Timed for the centenary of the Russian Revolution, this mammoth epic from best-seller Fitch (Paint It Black, 2006) presents this tumultuous epoch from the viewpoint of a passionate, resilient young woman. The daughter of a bourgeois St. Petersburg family in 1916, Marina Makarova is caught up by revolutionary fervor. First enamored of her older brother's friend, then irresistibly drawn to a Bolshevik poet, she finds her family relationships and friendships torn apart as the country's political and social order ruptures. With heightened immediacy, Fitch's novel presents a richly described, on-the-street view of the revolution's transformative, often violent throes in Marina's beloved and heartbreaking city, from the behavior of newly emboldened servants to rampant hunger and poverty, and speculators negotiating backroom deals. Fitch provides an excellent sense of history's unpredictability and shows how the desperate pursuit of survival leads to morally compromising decisions. It's unusual for a novel of this length to follow a single narrative thread, and the ending turns bizarre, but the momentum rarely slackens. Fitch's cinematic storytelling and Marina's vibrant personality are standout elements in this dramatic novel.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)