What I found somewhat exaggerated was the abundance of native characters to the best of my knowledge, they are few and far between in Kamchatka. I wonder whether someone is working on it? They should. Some of the reactions and words used by the characters in the dialogue were impossible for a Russian, but that is something to be expected (and easily corrected if translated into Russian properly). I've never been to Kamchatka many local things might have been wrong - though I doubt it but in general terms, the Russian plausibility was great all along. Actually, that's one of the best qualities of the novel I fully expected it to be the kind of 'wide-branching cranberry,' as the Russian phrase goes, but no - I could not find anything that seemed completely impossible or improbable. While it is not a fast-paced thriller, it's constructed well, and though I am usually distracted or bored by an endless gallery of varying characters, in this case it was quite tolerable (but I guess the result could have been different for the reader who cannot get all those names, and especially their variation while it's absolutely transparent for a Russian, the author does not make this easy for an unprepared reader). This is a loosely knit novel centering around the disappearance (kidnapping abduction) of two young girls right from downtown Petropavlovsk and a sweeping story which covers all of Kamchatka of (more or less) today.
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