Disappearing Earth and The Rabbit Girls

Disappearing Earth,  by Julia Phillips, was presented, but not chosen, at one of my book groups.  It sounded fascinating to me so I read it.  And it was fascinating!



This novel is a story about two young girls who were kidnapped in Kamchatka, a remote region in Russia.  The novel takes place over the year after the girls were taken.  Each chapter is told month-by-month after the abduction and is about different, but connected loosely to the story, women from the same region.  After a while, the story began to mesh and build up to the last month of that year.  The ending of the story was quite satisfying.

This novel stayed with me for a long time.  It is a crime story, but the social implications were really interesting.  In this remote region, men were portrayed as dangerous and the women as too strong for the men to value.

I got The Rabbit Girls, by Anna Ellery, from the library as it was also a book that I had heard about and wanted to read.  There were a few things that I did not care for or found hard to believe in the book, and those things distracted me.  I'll get to those soon.



The story takes place in 1989 when the Berlin Wall was first opened.  Miriam came to Berlin to care for Henryk, her dying father from whom she had been estranged.  Her mother had died, and Miriam was their only child.  After Miriam arrived to stay and care for her father, he began crying out for "Freida".  Miriam had no idea who that was.  Soon Miriam discovered numbers tattooed under her father's watchband and she realized that he had been in Auschwitz.  She had no knowledge of that fact.  Miriam began looking around the apartment to see if she could learn more about her father's history and in her mother's closet, she came across a dress that was from Ravensbruck.  And within the seams of that dress, Miriam discovered love letters from Freida to Henryk that had never been sent or seen by anyone.

Are you picking up on any distractions here?  Like is it believable that Miriam grew up never seeing the tattoo on her father's wrist?  Or that her mother kept Freida's dress and never told anyone?

I did enjoy the reading of the letters that described not only their love but of life in the camp.  But here's my biggest complaint-the Rabbit Girls were only mentioned briefly in Freida's letters.  The book was not about the Rabbit Girls.  That was very misleading to me.

I also found the end of the story very predictable.

So, I guess that I'm not really recommending this book.  Or am I?  I don't even know.