Petropolis

Sasha Goldberg, a mixed-race Jew, grows up in the dismal Siberian town of Asbestos 2, with neither looks nor talents to suggest that her life will ever go anywhere. She manages to move to Moscow to attend a destitute art school, but soon an ill-fated romance leaves her a teenage single mother. Sasha`s own mother commandeers the baby, and a desperate Sasha sells herself as a mail-order bride to a man in Phoenix. Needless to say, that endeavor also ends in disaster, and, after a humiliating stint in Chicago, Sasha heads to Brooklyn to find her long-absent father. At turns hilarious and tragic, satirical and deadly serious, PETROPOLIS welds together the inequities of adolescence with the agony of the cultural misfit and creates a glorious train-wreck of a novel that readers simply will not be able to put down. Copyright (C) Muze Inc. 2005. For personal use only. All rights reserved.