Book Review: Disappearing Earth

Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips

Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips is the perfect novel for a person stuck at home during a global pandemic. Rarely has a book so thoroughly transported me away from my own life. Before picking this up, I had never heard of the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia, but after reading it, I felt like I had lived there my entire life.

Phillips does a remarkable job giving her reader a sense of place. In 250 pages, she takes us up and down the peninsula, from the rocky, sheltered bay on the brink of the Pacific Ocean where the novel starts to the snow pounded roads in the remote town of Esso where the story ends. By the time you’ve finished the book, you’ll feel as if you just got home from a long, eventful trip to a remote, wintery corner of Russia.

This book is centered around the kidnapping of two young girls named Alyona and Sophia, but Phillips tells their story in an unconventional way. After introducing the girls on the day of their kidnapping, Phillips spends the rest of the novel bouncing through vignettes about an array of seemingly unrelated characters. All of these characters are women, and each one’s life has been impacted in some (often indirect) way by the girls’ disappearance.

This structure allows Phillips to do something unique. In Disappearing Earth, she provides readers with a book that is both a thriller detective novel and an unembellished account of the day-to-day challenges faced by the women who live on this isolated peninsula.

For example, we meet an indigenous university student named Ksyusha as she navigates a long-distance relationship with an abusive white boyfriend. We’re introduced to childhood friends Lada and Masha, who reconnect at a New Year’s Eve party: Lada learns her friend is lesbian and fears for her life. We also spend a distraught evening with a researcher named Oksana as she searches for her beloved dog, who ran away after her friend’s clumsy boyfriend left her apartment door ajar.

At a glance, the snippets of these women’s lives seem disconnected. However, by the end of the novel, Phillips masterfully weaves them into one cohesive narrative. It’s a detailed, beautifully written, and very well-researched novel. And in the end, Phillips brings us back to where the story began — with two little girls who have, seemingly, disappeared from Earth.

You can buy Disappearing Earth here.

Rating: 5 stars

Rating Scale:
5 Stars: I love this book!!!
4 Stars: Pretty good
3 Stars: Good
2 Stars: Not for me
1 Star: Truly dislike