My review of Anna Solomon’s The Little Bride is up on High Country News. Here’s how it begins:

The Little Bride
Anna Solomon
314 pages, softcover: $15. 
Riverhead, 2011.

Anna Solomon’s fascinating first novel The Little Bride begins in Russia in the 1880s, when Minna Losk, a 16-year-old orphan, signs up to become a mail-order bride. After the death of her father, Minna worked for a while as a maid for a once-wealthy woman. Now, however, with pogroms against Jews increasing in number and intensity and little hope for a better life in Odessa, she decides to try her luck in America as the wife of a Jewish man she’s never met.

Solomon’s premise is irresistible as Minna embarks on a journey similar to those many real-life immigrant settlers made. Her sensuous writing transports the reader from Odessa’s “acacias in full bloom, her lizards asleep in the last sun, the scent of tomato plants coming up off the piers” to the sickness and filth of the voyage to America, the ship’s floor “slick with vomit.” Minna lands in New York, which feels “like being in the middle of a parade where everyone has been called home, all at once, in all different directions.”

Please click through to read the rest:

http:/http://www.hcn.org/issues/44.1/from-the-old-world-to-the-old-west-a-review-of-the-little-bride