A Bend in the Stars by Rachel Barenbaum

 A Bend in the Stars by Rachel Barenbaum was our June book club book. 

Pre-book club take: I kind of hated this book. I forced myself to read twenty pages a day for a couple of weeks before I read the very last bit the day before book club and it felt like I had homework and I was grumpy every time I saw it on our coffee table.  

In WWI Russia, we follow a family of Jewish people as they get separated and reunited.  The sister is a surgeon, exceedingly rare at the time; the brother is a physicist who is desperately trying to finish the work Einstein started; and we meet a variety of other characters as we move along.

The writing was chilly and I never really cared a whit about a single one of these characters and at one point I actually wondered if I could just pretend they all got shot by the Russians and closed the book.  Alas, this was not meant to be and I did sort of finish the book, although I'll admit to skimming a fair amount by the end.

After book club take: No one liked the book. Would not recommend. Actively discouraged folks from ever wanting to go to Russia. 

Notable lines: 

"Life in the United States wouldn't be perfect, only better. The Okhrana wouldn't come in the middle of the night. Neighbors wouldn't disappear. They had family in a city called Philadelphia. Baba's cousins had written describing their lives there, saying their work left them bone weary but safe. Safe. Only now did Miri understand what that word meant, did she begin to understand what her grandmother must have seen as a girl." (page 71)

"Weren't Americans cowboys?" (page 240)

"The crickets were loud. Mosquitos buzzed. Dima swatted one and missed. At sea they had sharks; he'd take their razor teeth over the insects' thousands of pinpricks any day." (page 251)