At the End of the World, Turn Left

March 22, 2021
In Slor’s elegantly written and thought-provoking debut, set in 2007 and 2008, 25-year-old Masha returns to Milwaukee from her home in Israel at the request of her father, who begs her to find her missing 19-year-old sister, Anna. Masha’s search for Anna also becomes a search for Masha’s own sense of herself. As she comes to terms with her parents’ emigration from the Ukraine when she was a child, she reexamines her decision to settle in Israel. Masha shares narrative duties with Anna, whose life changed due to an exchange of messages on MySpace with a Ukrainian woman claiming to be her half-sister. As Anna notes, “Consequences don’t always appear in one fell swoop; sometimes they are jagged, ripping slowly through the course of your everyday life, like dull scissors cutting fabric. One moment, everything is as it always was. And the next?” Slor keeps the suspense high in this unconventional detective story, using her characters’ musings on language and perception to enrich readers’ understanding of how and why events unfold as they do. Those looking for an intricately textured tale of family relationships will be rewarded.

April 1, 2021
"Some people choose to hold on to their traumas while others throw them out like a worn-out coat," says Masha, the beleaguered heroine of this dysfunctional-family thriller. Masha is trying to throw her worn-out coat away, but her family's trauma, dragged from communist Ukraine to an almost-as-dreary existence in Milwaukee, keeps pursuing her even as she starts over in Israel. Now much more religious than her nominally Jewish family, Masha lives with an Israeli Defense Forces boyfriend but returns to Milwaukee at her father's insistence when her sister, Anastasia, or Anna, goes missing. Chapters alternate between Masha's chilly, frustrating search for Anna in the present day (2008) and Anna's descent from aimless college student to something much worse in the period just before her disappearance. This wonderful debut, by an author who herself trod Masha's family's path from the Soviet Union to the Midwest, is a match for patrons who enjoyed Zadie Smith's White Teeth (2000) or Rachel Zhong's Goodbye, Vitamin (2017). It's also a must for anyone who has ever had a needy Grandma who anticipates death every morning (this character alone is worth the read).

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