The Orchard: a coming of age story during the final days of the USSR

The Orchard by Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry is a coming of age story set in the final days of the USSR. Anya and her best friend, Milka, try to envision a free and hopeful future for themselves, like the one they are told happens in America. They spend their summers at Anya’s family dacha (country house) outside of Moscow and exploring the apple orchard there. When they are fifteen, the Soviet Empire is on the verge of collapse, they begin to spend time with two male classmates, Petya and Aleksey. Together, the four friends discuss history, politics and forbidden books, as well as share secrets and desires. As the world is changing, they soon find that their time together is drawing shorter and shorter. When the family’s apple orchard is threatened, Anya realizes that memories do not fade as they are the connection from our past. Inspired by Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, The Orchard chronicles the lives of four Soviet teenagers as they struggle to survive. 

I was intrigued by the premise of teenagers during the last years of the Soviet Union. However, the story was very slow and I found myself drifting as I read. There was no beauty or poetry to the language used as the story did not flow. There was a lot of showing and not telling. All the characters are flawed; however, I found myself not caring about them or their growth, if they had any growth at all. There was a lot of focus on sex and the descriptions of their bodies. While I am not a prude, the vulgarity of the language used was shocking and a turn off. While inspired by Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, any parallels between the play and the book were lost on me as I have not read The Cherry Orchard. I may read The Cherry Orchard and return to The Orchard to reread to find more similarities, symbolism and meaning. However, right now, it was a book I found hard to read. 

The Orchard is available in hardcover, eBook, and audiobook