∎ Download You Are One of Them Elliott Holt 9781594205286 Books

You Are One of Them Elliott Holt 9781594205286 Books

Download As PDF : You Are One of Them Elliott Holt 9781594205286 Books

You Are One of Them Elliott Holt 9781594205286 Books

I read this book in one day. That should tell you something about it- the characters, the pace, the atmosphere. I don't know too much about what life was like during the Cold War, but this book was able to capture the undoubtedly tense feelings of the Americans. It didn't delve too deep into the Russian side of the conflict, but the story wasn't about that. It was about the suspicion that your neighbor, your best friend was a spy. Holt never actually comes out and says whether or not Jennifer's parents are double agents for Russia, but she plants to seed of doubt and your overactive imagination does the rest. Or perhaps it was just my overactive imagination. In any case, this book is a tense, political thriller that is told from the point of view of a 12 year old girl, Sarah, from a broken home and a mother who is paranoid about nuclear war. Definite must read.


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You Are One of Them Elliott Holt 9781594205286 Books Reviews

I'd rate this book 3.5 stars.

Those of us who were culturally aware during the 1980s may remember the story of Samantha Smith. She was a young American girl who wrote a letter to then-Soviet Union leader Yuri Andropov during the height of Cold War tensions, asking if he was planning to start a nuclear war with the U.S., and asking for peace. She and her family were ultimately invited to be Andropov's guests in the Soviet Union, where they spent two weeks on a media tour, and Smith became a media darling on both sides of the world. Smith was a peace activist and had just begun an acting career when she and her parents were killed in a plane crash in 1985.

Smith's story is the basis for Elliott Holt's intriguing and well-told You Are One of Them. In this book, however, it is insecure, needy Sarah Zuckerman, fueled by her mother's growing fear of nuclear war, who decides to write a letter to Andropov, only to have her idea copied by her best friend, perky Midwestern transplant Jenny Jones.

Jenny's letter is the one the media and Andropov get hold of, and while she becomes the media darling and ambassador for American children everywhere, Sarah is left in her Washington home, pining for her friend, both resenting the attention her friend is getting and feeling relieved it wasn't her letter that Andropov responded to. And when like Smith, Jenny and her parents die in a plane crash, Sarah is left to wonder whether her friendship would have lasted had Jenny lived (it was already deteriorating given Jenny's new fame), and feeling alone and aimless.

Ten years later, Sarah receives an email from Svetlana, a Russian woman who was Jenny's escort during her trip to Russia. Svetlana claims that Jenny's death may have been a hoax, simple propaganda, and encourages Sarah to come to Moscow to find the truth. Still somewhat aimless, still reluctant to let anyone else in since Jenny's death, Sarah travels to post-perestroika Russia, where she sees more of the everyday struggles of the Russian people and culture than Jenny did years ago. And as she tries to determine whether she will ever know the truth, she also tries to finally move on with her life after so long.

"I've come to understand that some people are suns that pull others into their orbit," Sarah said.

But where do you go when your emotional sun disappears? And much like in nature, can people flourish without that sun? You Are One of Them is a compelling (if somewhat improbable) story of loss, insecurity, young friendship, and finding one's self. Holt doesn't whitewash her characters' flaws, which makes them both more and less appealing at times, but you are driven to continue more because you want to know what ultimately will happen than because you have sympathy for Sarah.
A lot of reviewers have already ably covered the plot of this book, based on the Samantha Smith story a youthful friendship; a letter to Andropov; emotional estrangement, a summons to Russia; the mystery of the missing friend behind the Curtain; the anxieties of the Cold war and so forth. But as a person who lived behind the Iron Curtain as well as outside it, I was truly engaged by the author's astute observations of perceptions of both American and Russian culture and her use of the discrepancies (yet similarities)between the two as a vehicle for examining that useful question How well do we really know anyone else, and by extension, ourselves? And by the way, whose truth is real pravda?

I was totally involved in the first half of the book the use of defection as metaphor, the intimacies and vagaries of childhood friendship, the hold of the promise of best friend foreverness. But the capture of the quirks of the Russian experience and language is equally engrossing if not even more. As a person from Poland raised in America I chuckled, for instance, to find how Holt's Sarah had noticed and noted the trying frequency with which Russians preempt sentences with "unfortunately" just like Poles do a language's nod to an engrained sense of futility. Or how defamiliarized the article "the" sounds when misapplied by a Russian struggling with its nuance. I found it clever how the narrator's evolving perception and understanding of Moscow was strained through those untranslateable but culturally integral expressions of a foreign language. But much as I enjoyed the Russian landscaping, I am not sure why I lost interest in Sarah's pursuit of Jenny towards the end of the novel it felt to me like the momentum had stalled and the language of Sarah's own understanding of herself lost some muscle and metaphor. As well, I agree with reviewers who find the language of the letter somewhat contrived-- maybe that is intentional? In any case, the latter part of the novel flagged somewhat, hence only three stars.

I agree with another reviewer who wonders what Holt's next book will be about because the author does tell an interesting tale of attachment, confusion and personal mystery. In sum, for me, apart from the thriller-like plot of a narrator obsessed by a childhood friendship and Cold War flashbacks, in essence, this book was the literary version of the Gotye song Just Someone I Used to Know. It's a reasonably readable jaunt into the foreign territory that is any relationship--whether with a country, or with a person whom we could have sworn we knew the truth about, down to shared password or familiar birthmark, only to find out later that...oh, well.
I read this book in one day. That should tell you something about it- the characters, the pace, the atmosphere. I don't know too much about what life was like during the Cold War, but this book was able to capture the undoubtedly tense feelings of the Americans. It didn't delve too deep into the Russian side of the conflict, but the story wasn't about that. It was about the suspicion that your neighbor, your best friend was a spy. Holt never actually comes out and says whether or not Jennifer's parents are double agents for Russia, but she plants to seed of doubt and your overactive imagination does the rest. Or perhaps it was just my overactive imagination. In any case, this book is a tense, political thriller that is told from the point of view of a 12 year old girl, Sarah, from a broken home and a mother who is paranoid about nuclear war. Definite must read.