Good Citizens Need Not Fear by Maria Reva is a unique read with overlapping stories.

I thought the first half of this book was insanely good. I was over the moon, ready to post to all of my social media for everyone to rush out and get this book. Then the second half of the book hit and... I wasn't as interested. The dark humour was awesome and the plot was going so good, but then the second half of the book just kind of happened. It didn't pull my attention and slowed down a lot. I wanted more out of this book. All of these overlapping and intertwining stories seemed like it was going to go down an epic path and then it just... happened. It was there and that was it. There wasn't much substance to the second half of the book nor was there any theme or message. It just exists.

It felt like a good contemporary book for someone seeking something different. It's general fiction with different stories that all exist in the same world.

If you want books that centre around politics and interesting dynamics then this book is for you!

Three out of five stars.

I received this book for free through Goodreads First Reads. ( )

excellent debut, a very good read ( )

In her sure-handed debut volume of short fiction, Good Citizens Need Not Fear, Maria Reva writes with an insider’s familiarity about the last days of the Soviet Union and what followed in the months and years after the Communist regime’s ignominious collapse. Reva’s stories, filled with absurdist twists and farcical comic moments, describe her characters’ struggle for survival in a world of decaying infrastructure, chronic shortages and surly, inflexible bureaucrats. Somehow, despite severe economic hardship and great physical discomfort, Reva’s people find ways to fudge a rigid, rule-bound system and make a go of it. The stories, divided into two sections (“Before the Fall,” “After the Fall”), centre on the residents of the apartment building at 1933 Ivansk Street in the Ukrainian town of Kirovka, a building that, in the opening story, “Novostroika,” has its very existence called into question by a government official even though the story’s protagonist, the hapless Daniil, who is visiting the town council hall to make a complaint about the faulty heating system, lives there with thirteen other family members. “Little Rabbit” introduces the reader to one of several recurring characters. As a newborn with a harelip, Zaya is consigned to a home for unwanted infants—the “baby house”—and raised by staff caregivers, known as sanitarki. Despite the odds against her, little Zaya fiercely embraces life, but is eventually committed to the internat, a facility for hopeless cases housed in a decommissioned monastery. There, she falls ill with pneumonia, but escapes the shallow grave awaiting her by burrowing into the catacombs beneath the building, where she forms a deep attachment to the mummified body of a saint. In “Letter of Apology” the narrator, Mikhail Ivanovich, an official with “the agency,” is sent to Kirovka to discipline the poet Konstantyn Illych, who has been overheard telling a joke about the regime. Konstantyn Illych can avoid punishment by retracting his “wrongful evaluations of the leaders of the Communist Party and Soviet society at large” and issuing an apology in writing. But Konstantyn Illych is unfazed by Mikhail Ivanovich’s threats and steadfastly ignores him. In the meantime, Mikhail Ivanovich, who has never heard the joke because it is forbidden to repeat it, unravels under ever greater pressure from his superiors to extract the apology. In the end, Mikhail Ivanovich reaches a fragile understanding with the poet’s wife, Milena, finally concluding that the joke is really on him. And in “Miss USSR,” Konstantyn Illych, engaged in another subversive activity, organizes a beauty pageant in Kirovka and thereby brings down on himself the wrath of the new Minister of Culture. When the Minister organizes a national pageant modelled on but splashier than the one in Kirovka, Konstantyn Illych decides to show her up by entering a contestant. But with the winner of his Miss Kirovka pageant exiled to Siberia, he ends up recruiting Zaya. Predictably, things do not turn out as he had hoped. Maria Reva’s brand of humour in these stories is broad and laden with irony; her action sequences tend toward the slapstick and highly improbable. For the most part the reader is pleasantly entertained, though Reva does occasionally indulge a fondness for illogic and weirdness, allowing the story to meander. This happens infrequently, but when it does the joke wears thin and the comic scenario becomes over-familiar and tiresome (“Lucky Toss”). Despite the occasional minor misstep however, Good Citizens Need Not Fear remains a notable debut by a uniquely skilled and confident writer with a huge talent that, based on the evidence, will only grow with time. ( )

Good Citizens Need Not Fear is an absolutely fantastic collection of short stories set in and around a tenement building in Ukraine shortly before and just after the fall of the USSR. It's at turns heartbreaking and darkly humorous, with a touch of surreal beauty. I love that the characters show up over multiple stories and through different time periods, interconnected, but never quite part of a single narrative. It's also fascinating to see how they grow and change and what they have to do to survive in a crumbling infrastructure. I can't recommend this highly enough for anyone interested in the time period, or just well written shorts stories. Warning: You may get attached to these ordinary people in these seemingly outlandish situations. ( )

I had high hopes for Good Citizens Need Not Fear, a series of interconnected stories set in or near an apartment building in Ukraine that appears on no government maps. The possibilities for simultaneous humor and things-to-chew on was enticing. And this was a good book, just not as good a book as I'd hoped.

The individual stories work as stand-alones, but also fit together neatly. The writing style is direct, clear, and at times whimsical. The book makes delightful use of occasional, unusual illustrations that feel like little treats scattered about for readers to discover.

I think the main reason I didn't fall more wildly in love with this book is that it reminded me of, but did not compare successfully with, Anthony Marra's The Tsar of Love and Techno. Marra's book was less humorous than Good Citizens, so they don't occupy exactly the same reading niche. Depending on individual tastes, readers will come to different decisions about which of the two the prefer. For me, the bottom line was that the relationships among characters and those characters themselves were more complex in Marra's book—and I tend to value complexity.

That said, Good Citizens Need Not Fear is an entertaining read that goes beyond humor to depict life in a part of the world currently in the news, but unfamiliar to most U.S. readers. It's worth checking out.

I received a free electronic review copy of this book from the piublishers via NetGalley. The opinions are my own. ( )