The Red Passport

"The unpredictable, poignant, and often comic stories that make up Katherine Shonk's The Red Passport portray the tumult, hopes, and setbacks of natives and foreigners alike in post-Communist Russia. Many of the Russians in these stories are strangers in their own country, learning to navigate a new landscape of Dunkin' Donuts franchises that flourish where consumer culture was so recently anathema; where the fall of the Soviet Union has not brought peace or prosperity; and where people still find a way to reach out for love, despite often disastrous results. "My Mother's Garden" is a parable of broken promises - an old woman living near Chernobyl does not understand why she can't eat those lovely, robust onions, better than any she's grown. "Our American" tells the story of a thirteen-year-old boy who watches with fascination and dread as his older brother, a veteran of the Chechen war, pursues the American girl next door. "The Young People of Moscow" describes an extraordinary day in the life of an aging couple selling Soviet poetry in an underground bazaar. A former American expatriate returns to Russia in "The Conversion" and, like a bull in a china shop, makes a mess of things with a young Russian couple who had once been his friends."--Jacket.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.