Off to Siberia!

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Do you have two personalities? The fabulous Elisabeth Elo says she does, and more on that in a moment, But first—oh. I am so excited. It’s such an absolute joy when a dear pal has a wild success. I am trying to remember where I met Elisabeth Elo—Elisabeth, do you remember? But it seems as if we have always been friends.

            Elisabeth hit a home run with her first thriller, NORTH OF BOSTON.  It made all the “best of”  lists and she was on the way. Now, her journey to certain stardom continues—with FINDING KATARINA M. And in all the books in all the world, you have nee read anything like this.

            Spies, Russia, reindeer, an amazing heroine, non-stop adventure, disaster, radioactive waste, diamonds, ballerinas, prisons,  blizzards, a trek over an icy river, murder, betrayal love and family. And vodka.    

           How do you like it so far?

           And, as I said, the wonderful Elisabeth insists she has two personalities. Do you?

WHERE IN THE WORLD

By Elisabeth Elo

Sometimes I do things as a writer I would never do in real life. For example, the Real Me would never fly halfway around the world to trek to a small village in northeastern Siberia so I could just hang out for a while and soak up the atmosphere. Nope, that sort of thing does not appeal to the Real Me at all. I’m your basic latte-and-chocolate kind of girl.  I like to sit in my cozy house with my fluffy pooch curled up at my feet. 

The Writer Me is an entirely different creature. She routinely dreams up wacky, off-the-wall ideas and immediately, thoughtlessly, blurts out YES! THAT WILL DEFINITELY WORK! 

Plus, while the Real Me is not any more motivated than the next person, the Writer Me fervently believes in the transcendent value of ART and will go far, far out of her way for the sake of a story. 

That was how I ended up boarding a plane a few years ago to go off on a solo adventure to Siberia. Looking back, I’m sort of amazed I did it, but I’m not at all sorry, because that trip gave me my just-published novel, Finding Katarina M. I couldn’t possibly have written it without first-hand experience of the people and the place. So there you go. The Writer Me wasn’t so crazy after all. She was just doing her work. 

What I came to understand from my experience is that there are usually two sides to a place. There’s the place as it exists in your imagination; then there’s the real place. 

These two places can be, and usually are, quite different. The Siberia of my imagination was a cold, dark, dangerous place where millions of people had died in the gulag and many more had been exiled.  I am sorry to say that I saw the whole region as a sort of dreadful prison.

The real Siberia, of course, is nothing like that. It’s a vital, evolving society full of diverse peoples who are doing amazing things. When I was in Yakutsk, the city was booming; construction cranes were everywhere. Cultural life includes opera, ballet, and a yearly film festival. Yakutsk is Russian city, obviously, but it feels very much like its own place, with its own identity and pride.

So my western imagination got a good dose of reality, and somehow, from the merging of these two things, came a novel about an American woman who travels to Siberia to find a grandmother she mistakenly believed had perished in the gulag. Natalie (that’s the main character) faces down a lot of bad stuff and experiences some good stuff along the way, none of which she could possibly have predicted when she lived in her cozy world of lattes and chocolate (sound familiar?). 

Which brings me to a question I love to think about, and you might enjoy as well. We all have certain places that live vividly in our imaginations, either for good, bad, or mixed reasons.

 If you could set a novel anywhere in world, where would you go and what kind of novel would you write? A foggy London mystery? A sensual love story set in the south of France? An African adventure? Where would your character stay? For how long? Why is she there, and what does she hope to discover? Let your imagination run wild—why not?  It’s fun, and it’s only a story, right? 

HANK:  Oooooh. Let me think. And we have to go there, right?  So...not Siberia. How about you, Reds and readers? (Have you ever been there?)  And a copy of FINDING KATARINA M. to one very lucky commenter!

 Elisabeth Elo is the author of the suspense novels Finding Katarina M. andNorth of Boston, chosen by Booklist as a Best Crime Novel Debut. She grew up in Boston, attended Brown University, and earned a PhD in English from Brandeis. She worked as a children's magazine editor, a high-tech  product manager, and a halfway house counselor before starting to write fiction. To learn more, visit www.elisabethelo.com  

FINDING KATARINA M

American doctor travels to Russia to find her estranged grandmother, only to uncover dark family secrets and a dangerous international plot.  

Natalie March is a successful doctor enjoying a busy life in Washington DC. She always thought that her maternal grandparents perished in the gulag, Stalin’s notorious network of labor camps. But when a young Russian dancer comes to Natalie’s office claiming to be her cousin, Natalie must face a surprising truth: her grandmother, Katarina Melnikova, is still very much alive. Natalie eagerly travels to Siberia to meet her, only to be drawn into a web of mystery, intrigue, and danger that will push her to the limits of her endurance. 

How far will Natalie go to find Katarina M.? How much will she risk to protect her Russian family and her own country from a deadly threat? FINDING KATARINA M. takes the reader on an extraordinary journey across Siberia—to reindeer herding camps, Sakha villages, and parties with endless vodka toasts—while it explores what it means to be loyal to your family, your country, and yourself. 

Vortex, Shmortex

“Pirio Kasparov is an alluring heroine. She’s sharp-witted, hell-bent on finding the truth, and her narrative voice is laced with surly sexiness. Pirio’s baldly honest, slightly melancholic reflections and Elo’s use of extreme natural settings will have strong appeal for Scandinavian crime fans. An impressive debut with surprising literary depth.”

                                                       —Booklist (starred) on NORTH OF BOSTON

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN:  Three things 
about Siberia.
  (I’ve never written that sentence before, so that makes 
it four things.)

1. When we were kids, it was the ultimate threat. My mother would say—“Keep doing that, kiddo, and it’s SIBERIA for you.”  We weren’t quite sure what or where that was, 
but it sounded bad.

2. In college, I was big on the game of Risk.  Yakutsk was a very good territory to get, and so was Irkutsk. Apparently, who knew, they are in Siberia.

3. I know this because of Elisabeth Elo, a fellow Bostonian whose astonishing new book NORTH OF BOSTON is brand new and getting fabulous reviews all around.  She has
 been to Siberia! (I guess she must have defied her mother….) and she says all this talk about the polar vortex?  Well, what’s Russian for “pooh-pooh”?    

And we think we’ve got it bad… 

                by Elisabeth Elo, author of North of Boston

Right now it’s 6:08 pm on January 21, and it’s snowing pretty hard here in Boston.  Commuters are driving home on slippery streets, trying to get there before the blizzard that’s roaring up the coast actually hits.  There’s a traffic back-up outside my window, and the temperature is a brisk 10*F.  Ah, Boston, you’re my home! 

So what do Bostonians do on a night like tonight?  They complain.  Most likely, we’ll wake up tomorrow to a winter wonderland of bright white virgin snow -- a soft, sparkling landscape that would be the perfect setting for a beautiful love story (such as Love Story).  But we’ll still complain.  Most of us will have the day off from work or school – and what will we do?  Complain.  Out sledding with our kids, we’ll complain.  With our feet up before a cozy fire, we’ll complain.  Why?  Because we like to. 

It’s sort of fun.  We’re Bostonians after all.  We’re tough, and we want everyone to know it.   So we won’t talk about gorgeous landscapes or sledding with our kids.  We’ll talk about downed tree limbs and blackouts and cars stuck in slushy drifts and huge sheets of snow sliding off slanted roofs onto parked cars below, shattering their windshields and almost killing nearby pedestrians.  Yup.  That’s how we talk up here in Beantown.  

It’s Man against Nature in these parts.

Which brings me to Siberia.

In Yakutsk, a city I visited this summer, the average January temperature is -40*F.  If you throw boiling water out your window, it freezes before it hits the pavement. 
A dull fog (frozen water vapor) often blankets the earth.  If you turn off your car, the fuel freezes within minutes, so cars must be kept running twenty-four hours a day or kept in a heated garage, which hardly anyone has. 

On the good side, the women all have fur coats.  I do not grudge them this as they are probably the only people in the world who actually need them. 

(Our neon-colored synthetic parkas with all the snaps, zippers, and pockets are a just a joke to them.) 

Oh, and the children aren’t kept home from school until the temperature falls to below -50*F.

So one day this past August I happened to find myself in a small village called Cherkeh, which is about a five-hour ride via “taxi” 
(this is a euphemism for a rusted-out van with no shock absorbers in which many people are crammed) from Yakutsk, which is itself quite far away from anything.  

Cherkeh is pretty much inaccessible during the winter months, and because I was feeling some fear and awe imagining what the winter there must be like,   

I asked an approximately 80-year-old Sakha man named Dimitri what it was like to live in Cherkeh in the---  

And before I could even finish the sentence, he looked at me with some disgust and barked, “What do you think we do?  We go the store, we make dinner, we visit friends.  Did you think we stayed in our houses all winter long?” 

That’s when I had an epiphany. 

It came to me that Boston actually isn’t the center of the universe, that a blizzard is just another type of weather, that kids have every right to play outside until their cheeks are pink and their wool mittens are frozen stiff because they’ve been happily sucking snow off them, and that one person’s frigid ten degrees is someone else’s springtime. 

You might be wondering why I went to Siberia.  (I don’t blame you for this.)  It was to do research for the novel I’m writing, so far untitled.  If everything goes as planned, my debut suspense novel, North of Boston, will be published 31 hours from now (now being 7:06 pm on 1/21/2014).  It’s very exciting, of course, to think that North of Boston will soon be on bookstore shelves.  But my attention keeps straying to the new novel that’s on my desk, the one taking place partly in Siberia. 

Luckily, the season isn’t winter.

My tough-talking Boston protagonist isn’t tough enough for that! 

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Now I am truly embarrassed that I am typing this with a blanket over my lap and wearing fingerless gloves.Wimp.

Anyway! The fabulous Elisabeth is giving away a copy of NORTH OF BOSTON to one lucky commenter (no PO boxes and US only, please...)  So, Reds, what's the coldest weather you've ever been in?

*********************

  Suspense Magazine wrote in their rave review of NORTH OF BOSTON: “There are gritty, hardcore mysteries and then there are gritty, witty mysteries that bring excellent humor, in-depth storytelling, and truly descriptive scenes together in a combination that makes you wish that the novel was playing out on the big screen. This particular debut is the latter; an amazing page-turner that brings Pirio Kasparov, an extremely witty girl from Boston, onto the literary scene… This is non-stop action; a debut read that’s highly recommended to all suspense mavens out there. Enjoy!” 

Elo grew up in Boston and went to Brown University.  She worked as an editor, an advertising copywriter, a high-tech project manager, and a halfway house counselor before getting a PhD in American Literature at Brandeis University.  Since then, she’s taught writing at Harvard, Tufts, and the evening school of Boston College.  She is already hard at work on the second book starring the NORTH OF BOSTON ensemble cast.  Below is more information on the book, and be sure to check out www.elisabethelo.com