Blogger’s note: I’m going through my backlog of books to review, and Disappearing Earth is one of them. Which is to say, I read this literal months ago and am going off notes I made then. Because of that, it’ll be brief-ish. I’ve backdated the review to reflect when I read it.

Rating: 🤷🏻‍♀️

I only read Disappearing Earth because it was our book club’s pick for May. Otherwise, I likely would’ve never picked this up. Which I think is important context because it was very much not for me, and I knew that early on but kept reading anyway (because book club). Interestingly enough, our book club was evenly split on who liked and didn’t like this one.

A brief synopsis…

Two young girls go missing from a remote Siberian peninsula of Kamchatka (in Russia), and months later, there’s still nothing to show for the police investigation. Through multiple women’s POVs, we get a better understanding of how difficult it is to be a woman in this part of Russia.

… and a brief-ish review

I really didn’t like this book.

You’ll notice, however, that I’ve rated it as a shrug emoji instead of the thumbs down I usually reserve for books I don’t like. And that’s because—while I struggled to keep reading because this book was so goddamned depressing that at times it felt like sad stories for the sake of them (I’ll get to that in a second) at times—it was gorgeously written and successful in setting the tone it seemed to want to, and the setting was so rich it truly felt like a character itself.

But god it was just so sad. There wasn’t even a glimmer of hope in there. And maybe that’s realistic for living in this part of the world (though I do have reservations about the author being American writing so intimately about different cultures, including indigenous ones), but it made it very hard for me, personally, to want to keep reading. And there were a few chapters that I honestly feel could have been left out (spoilers incoming: like the one where the woman’s second husband died on the exact same day her first husband did, or the one where the woman’s dog went missing and wasn’t found).

Good writing and utter sadness aside, I do think Disappearing Earth does also partly fail at what it sets out to do. While it’s billed as showing how the girls going missing affects the greater community, they are so far in the background of some of the stories that it doesn’t feel like a strong enough thread to pull the reader through. For that reason, I think readers who appreciate the pretty prose will enjoy this more than those earnestly trying to find out what happens to the girls from each story. Further, readers looking for a mystery thriller-vibe will likely be disappointed by this book.

But, as with anything, your mileage may vary. 🤷🏻‍♀️