The Red Scarf [Mass Market Paperback]

Kate Furnivall (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 24, 2008

The Russian Concubine dazzled readers. Now, its gifted author delivers another sweeping historical novel.

Davinsky Labor Camp, Siberia, 1933: Only two things in this wretched place keep Sofia from giving up hope: the prospect of freedom, and the stories told by her friend and fellow prisoner Anna, of a charmed childhood in Petrograd, and her fervent girlhood love for a passionate revolutionary named Vasily.

After a perilous escape, Sofia endures months of desolation and hardship. But, clinging to a promise she made to Anna, she subsists on the belief that someday she will track down Vasily. In a remote village, she?s nursed back to health by a Gypsy family, and there she finds more than refuge?she also finds Mikhail Pashin, who, her heart tells her, is Vasily in disguise. He?s everything she has ever wanted?but he belongs to Anna.

After coming this far, Sofia is tantalizingly close to freedom, family?even a future. All that stands in her way is the secret past that could endanger everything she has come to hold dear?

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Sophia Morozova's relationship with fragile Anna Fedorina begins through a small act of kindness at a 1930s Siberian labor camp. As the two inmates struggle daily to survive, they increasingly rely on each other for hope and comfort; when Anna falls ill, Sophia escapes, intending to find Anna's lifelong love, Vasily, and rescue Anna. Beautiful and charismatic, Sophia quickly becomes a force to reckon with in the town of Tivil, where she hopes to find Vasily, and her connections with powerful gypsy Rafik, the handsome factory director Mikhail Pashin and the stern but unreadable Aleksei Fomenko become satisfying sources of danger and desire. Furnivall (The Russian Concubine) paints a stark picture of rampant scarcity, grim regimentation and blaring propaganda in pre-WWII Soviet Russia. In pushing the limits of Sophia and Anna's love and friendship, she nicely pits small lives against a monolithic state, paradoxically composed of watchful villages. (July)
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From Booklist

*Starred Review* As she did in The Russian Concubine (2007), Furnivall again pinpoints a little-known historical setting and brings it vividly to life through the emotions and insights of her characters. Moving somewhere between the romanticized Doctor Zhivago and the grisly Gulag Archipelago, this historical novel portrays the hardships of a Siberian labor camp in 1938 while at the same time dramatizing the philosophical convictions driving both Soviet leaders and the resistance. The story opens with Sofia and her tubercular friend, Anna, slinging sledgehammers in the frozen taiga. Anna’s storytelling relieves the monotony of their existence while revealing her desperate yearning for her childhood friend, Vasily. Vowing to save Anna from certain death in the camp, Sofia lands on a plan to escape: to find Vasily and convince him to rescue Anna. A somewhat unrealistic but nevertheless riveting story follows: of Sofia’s adventures crossing the tundra nearly undetected; her arrival in Tivil, where gypsy partisans shelter her; and her dogged efforts to find—but not to fall in love with—Vasily. Page by page the suspense builds until, with the certainty of doom, the reader races to the astonishing denouement. Beautifully detailed descriptions of the land and the compelling characters who move through a  surprisingly upbeat plot make this one of the year’s best reads. --Jen Baker

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Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Mass Market Paperback: 480 pages
• Publisher: Berkley Trade (June 24, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0425221644
• ISBN-13: 978-0425221648
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (41 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #25,421 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Was this the first draft?, March 30, 2009

By 

E. Smiley (USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Red Scarf (Mass Market Paperback)

I started reading this book and was hooked. The storyline, involving a young woman trying to escape (and rescue her friend from) a labor camp in Siberia, was immediately appealing. Well-developed characters, fast-moving plot, detailed historical setting, skillful interweaving of past and present, it had it all.

Unfortunately, the book only went downhill from there.

At face value, it looks good, and The Red Scarf has a lot of potential--so much that I was sorry to see how quickly it devolved. Furnivall has a good grasp of how to write romance if that's what you're looking for, but here, it seems to be at the expense of the plot. Characters' actions have no consequences, so that we have a story set in a brutal world where people are killed or sent to labor camps for little or no reason, yet the main characters can get away with anything, up to and including murder. When misfortune does catch up with them, it usually comes out of the blue, not as a consequence of any of their numerous missteps, only to be too-easily solved. This is exacerbated as the book goes on--I won't spoil it, but at the end we have a couple of bizarre and completely unrealistic events, which Furnivall doesn't even attempt to explain, apparently hoping we won't notice.

Then the magic. Don't get me started. This book is set in a real, historical setting, in Russia during a brutal time. So, how to keep the characters from being arrested and killed or starving to death after the Soviet government confiscates all their food "for the good of the people"? Instead of showing us how real people in this time period dealt with these problems, Furnivall's solution is: bring in a gypsy with mind-twisting powers to save the day! It's a cop-out, and I for one felt cheated.

If you don't mind major plot holes, a series of increasingly unrealistic events, and a love story that quickly becomes nauseating for all but the most hardcore romance-novel fans, then this is the book for you. As for the rest of us, though, I don't recommend it.

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Disappointed..., February 21, 2009

By 

Cath (Melbourne, AUS) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Red Scarf (Mass Market Paperback)

This is my first reading of this novelists work, and I was quite disappointed. I have travelled in Russia, and am quite obsessed with the country and its amazing, if chequered, history. The fighting spirit of the Russian soul in many great works of literature has always intrigued me.

But this book disappointed me. The characters were poorly developed, especially Sofia, who felt distant to me. The plot was often confusing, with things seeming to happen before I even realised what was going on. The "relationship" between Sofia and Vasily in their youth (albeit a brief encounter) is glossed over and the allusions to the red scarf of the title were at best, cursory. I was most surprised by a book that I had hoped was grounded in reality of the tragedy of work camps, in its reliance upon the mystical - and even that was not explored in a way to give me satisfaction.

Perhaps if you like your Russian history in its mild, and fantasy form, this might be a book for you. But I prefer my Stalinist era based literature to be more Solzhenitsyn and less Barbara Cartland.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another amazing success for Furnivall!, July 13, 2008

By 

A. LaPointe (Oklahoma) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Red Scarf (Mass Market Paperback)

The Red Scarf was an excellent story. I found it to be just as engrossing as The Russian Concubine, but in a totally different way. Furnivall has the rare talent of making each of her novels a completely unique experience for the reader. Amazingly well researched, true to life in its time, I whole-heartedly recommend The Red Scarf.