The Half Life of Valery K: THE TIMES HISTORICAL FICTION BOOK OF THE MONTH

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So... all in all... I felt a bit let down here... but it wasn't BAD. I never felt annoyed enough to just give up on the book and DNF it. It was easily readable and I did like the premise... But I did expect a bit more from it than I got, so we'll go middle of the road 3 stars. One, however, had the unfortunate life choice of being married to the protagonist's love interest. The other had the unfortunate life choice of being the major female character of the story. In 1963, in a Siberian prison, former nuclear specialist Valery Kolkhanov has mastered what it takes to survive: the right connections to the guards for access to food and cigarettes, the right pair of warm boots, and the right attitude toward the small pleasures of life so he won’t go insane. But one day, all that changes: Valery’s university mentor steps in and sweeps him from the frozen camp to a mysterious unnamed city. It houses a set of nuclear reactors, and surrounding it is a forest so damaged it looks like the trees have rusted from within.

From the author of The Watchmaker of Filigree Street and The Kingdoms, an epic Cold War novel set in a mysterious town in Soviet Russia with a slow burn romance at its hearts. The Half Life of Valery K is based on real events in the Soviet Union, though the characters are fictional. Natasha Pulley’s whole thing is like M/M interracial romances in exotic (to a white British woman) locales, usually with a very plot-heavy timey wimey/conspiracy/adventure element which is very fun! Except each book also features her bizarre internal battle with signalling she is a feminist who thinks British colonialism is bad…….all while brutally killing off every woman that gets in the way of said romance, and also having a strange nationalist element (e.g. France winning the Napoleonic Wars leads to a despotic future where white slavery exists and the poor English people having to reinstate the good future where…..normal slavery exists). This never bothered me that much in the past because, whatever, I don’t take her seriously and I loved derangement but THIS book was beyond the pale and it didn’t even have the grace to be enjoyable!! I have to be honest. I doubted my rating because the last part of the book suddenly made my brows knit together. But I loved the overall story so much and I’m in awe with the writing, and therefore just pushed the glorious five-star button!One of Pulley’s favorite tropes are characters with good moral cores who have been put in situations where they feel, rightly or wrongly, that their only course of action is to cause pain and hurt. That trope is turned up to eleven in this book, as is appropriate for a novel about radiation experiments in Soviet Russia. With the Cold War raging, the stakes have never been higher for Soviet scientists. Radiation experiments could discover ways to mitigate or even cure radiation poisoning, saving millions of lives if the US ever nukes the Soviet Union. But radiation experiments can only be effective if a fair amount of ethics are thrown out the window. Is it worth harming some to save many? Where is the line?

Also Pulley has this trend in her books where all her female characters are unemotional, ruthless, often despicable girlbosses because defying gender norms I guess, and this sometimes results in interesting characters (like the antagonist of this book, a shady scientist lady who is the only compelling character). But then she does this thing where she will violently bulldoze every single one of these women because they get in the way of the gay couple. The girl Valery had a crush on? Shot in the head by Sexy KGB Man! Sexy KGB Man’s wife? She has terminal cancer after being forced to work in the radiation-poisoned town by her husband’s predicament! Evil scientist lady? She meets a violent end too, but this I’m less mad about because at least she injected some menace into this stale ass book. OH and there’s also an entire train carriage of women who get raped to death in front of Valery, for the purposes of making Valery grow a spine (it’s literally so he has something heroic to do i.e. take revenge on the rapists by murdering them all, in an attempt to make the audience sympathise with him more. Reader, I did not like him more.) Shenkov handed Valery a pamphlet. "There’s an ice rink in Newcastle." Language: English Words: 1,351 Chapters: 1/1 Comments: 10 Kudos: 56 Bookmarks: 2 Hits: 257 i'm not sure how anyone could get through reading the following scene without feeling it was extremely unnecessary, unwanted, out of line, and frankly insane: The way Valery spouts off, without consequences numbers about the gulag, it feels didactic infodump and unlike a lot of what we are told of that specific highly surveilled, controlled, society.I know this novel by Ms Pulley is not her typical work, no magical realism in it, but for me it was a book that offered terror and a feeling of helplessness through most realistic descriptions of the imaginary place and people that could have destroyed most of my world too. This is a piece of fiction but based on some real places and activities and the danger is still looming ... I've seen it before and once again I'm sitting here disappointed by the trajectory that both characters take. They're both headstrong women, brilliant in their field of work, and I had high hopes from how they were set up. Resovkaya is an older woman and enters the story with glittering red heels, lighthearted sass and a sway to her hips. She seemed to be a complex character with interesting sets of morals. Anna is pragmatic and easy-going and refuses to take no for an answer.