Skandal

"The words ring through me, clear and calming like a distant carillon. Shostakovich recedes to the background; the psychedelic record on the record player melts around us into cool liquid sound. It does not touch me. My fears for Mama and Zhenya cannot reach me. My mind is mine alone. The scrubbers cannot scratch at me here. My mind is mine alone."

3.25 STARS

So, we've made to America. All the bloodshed, Party politics, and psychic mind games are behind us...right? Wrong. This book picks up pretty much where the other one left off, with Yulia, her father, and Valentin now in America to work for the developing PsyOps team to counter a Communist plot connected with the brewing Vietnam war. Yulia, however, cannot dissociate the escalating psychic attacks in D.C. with her mother's work back in Russia. The story is divided into two main tensions: the struggle for Yulia to adjust to the technicolor capitalism of America and the internal conflict of abandoning her family to only reunite with a father who seems a stranger to her. This book, unfortunately, did not have the same intrigue that its predecessor had. Where Sekret had the depth of understanding Yulia's powers and the mystery of Veter I, Rostov, and the KGB internal alliances,Skandal seemed a bit juvenile and less developed with the PsyOps team, scrubber mutations, and family turmoil.

The character's emotions annoyed me somewhat in this book in a way that they hadn't before. Yulia's constant deprecation of herself and her somewhat acceptance of social diminishment put a sour note on my reading. However, I understand that with historical context in mind, this emotional manipulation would be completely expected. Also, I wish that there was more effort to understand the secondary characters, rather than just allowing Yulia's prejudice to overshadow them. I thought that the plot was interesting in the beginning, quite slow except for the Paris interlude in the middle, and then very rushed at the end. I found myself glancing toward how many pages were left and worrying about how much could truly be tied up in the remaining ten pages. Though I did really the ending's idea with Rostov and Yulia's mother, I think that the execution could have been better. This is the last book I believe in this duology, but I found myself wanting more from it or another novel/novella to flesh out the story just a bit.

The writing was smooth and I liked that I could imagine some of the conversations switching between Russian and English, a secondary blending of the two cultures in something as intimate in the chosen words of thought. There were moments when I felt, maybe not boredom, but certainly a drifting compulsion to find something else to do, which is not a good sign for the book. However, I do have to give this book the benefit of the doubt. When I was reading it, I was consumed with essays, projects, and exams so that might have skewed my feelings about the sequel. Now with all that done, I've been reconsidering the rating of the book. I waffled for some time between 3.25 and 3.5 stars, but I ended up settling on 3.25 because of the drifting I encountered from the story. This was a good filler read between classes, but I think it could have been developed a lot more to end with a bigger, completed finish that leaves the reader in awe for at least a few jaw-slackened minutes. Share your thoughts!

P.S. The gifs above with what I imagine Lena to be are from Man From U.N.C.L.E. which is an absolutely fantastic novel with a Cold War/espionage/Bond feel that is hilarious and wonderful and you should definitely watch it! You'll thank me later!