The Red Passport

The New York Times

[Shonk] writes with the comfortable sense of one who has not only been there but taken a good look around. — Rodney Welch

Publishers Weekly

In this promising debut collection set primarily in post-Communist Russia, expatriates and natives alike endeavor to make their way in a new social and economic landscape, often sharing an intense desire for whatever the other possesses: money, freedom, love, family. For Shonk, who spent time in Russia in the late 1990s, Americans abroad can be innocents, interlopers or cultural explorers. In "Kitchen Friends," an American journalist in Moscow who witnesses a trolley bombing by Chechen rebels forms a support group for the survivors, with the private hope that she can confess secrets from her Russian ancestors' dark history. Shonk avidly engages issues of displacement and loss, freedom and constraint. In the haunting "My Mother's Garden," a woman is hard-pressed to convince her mother that the town she refuses to leave is toxic, contaminated by an explosion at a nearby nuclear reactor. "It never ceases to shame me, this fear I have of touching my mother, of carrying the poison in her skin and clothes to my daughter," she thinks. In "Our American," an out-of-work former soldier insinuates himself into an American woman's life in the hopes that she will buy a pair of glasses for his little brother. As in "Honey Month" and "The Conversion," Shonk is at her best examining the lives of Americans whom the natives revere as potential saviors at the same time they dismiss them as frivolous tourists who could never hope to understand life in the former Soviet republic. That tension lends these stories an impressive vitality. Agent, Amy Williams. (Nov.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Shonk sets her debut collection in contemporary Russia, drawing on two kinds of conflict-internal (e.g., envy, loneliness, jealousy, old age, and human frailities) and external (e.g., serious, lingering problems due to contamination in the Chernobyl area, the influence of American visitors on the native people, and the decisions to grant, or reject, strongly desired visas for travel to the United States). Written with a keen eye and a sprinkling of Russian words to keep it authentic, these stories are charming and alarming at the same time. In "My Mother's Garden," included in the 2001 edition of The Best American Short Stories, an old woman living on the outskirts of Chernobyl longs to eat some wild onions. Shonk, a native of Illinois, spent several years in Russia in the late 1990s and uses her experience to strong effect here. Recommended for readers interested in contemporary Russian life.-Lisa Rohrbaugh, East Palestine Memorial P.L., OH Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Shonk, whose work has been included in Best American Short Stories, makes her solo debut with tales culled from time spent in Russia as the nation struggled toward post-communist solvency. The theme of freedom as a mixed blessing is elaborated rather repetitively, but it’s crystal-clear each time. "The Death of Olga Vasilievna" shows a young couple getting their first taste of liberty, both figurative and literal, when Sveta’s mother finally dies, but the cat they immediately adopt comes to stand for the complications of a country rocketing toward capitalism. When an American scientist comes snooping with a Geiger counter around a woman’s abnormally large vegetables in "My Mother’s Garden," how will her daughter convince her that the abundance is really a bad omen? "The Conversion" follows an American returning to Russia, the site of the best years of his life as well as his cuckolding, only to find friends repeating his own mistakes and a past that proves impossible to bury. A young Russian girl who grew up in San Francisco, daughter of a mail-order bride, returns to the white nights in "The Wooden Village of Kizhi," and she may finally be too old to believe the fairy tale that her real father drowned in a vat at an ice-cream factory. Shonk’s style is matter-of-fact, and these stories never lose their foreignness even when related by natives, but the emotions are real. The best piece, "The Young People of Moscow," hauntingly portrays an aging couple—a retired poet reduced to selling books in the bowels of Moscow while his wife rails against Americans who refuse disabled Russian babies—as they struggle for life in an accelerated world where "young Muscovites in business suits,their eyes shielded by sunglasses, brush by Nina and Vassily as if the two of them are statues." A talent undoubtedly headed toward higher achievements. Agent: Amy Williams/Collins McCormick