Publisher's Weekly Review
Spanning two decades, this brooding mystery/bildungsroman from Meadows (I Will Send Rain) begins in Norilsk, Siberia, in 1973, with eight-year-old Anya Petrova's acceptance into the Soviet gymnastics program. Anya's father, pyrometallurgist Yuri, is relieved; now that the Motherland considers his daughter an asset, they will take care of her--something he's felt increasingly unfit to do since his wife, Katerina, vanished three years earlier. Anya dreams of defying gravity, like Olympian Olga Korbut, and secretly hopes that if she makes the 1980 Moscow Olympics team, her mother will see her on television and come home. Katerina's disillusionment with the Communist Party likely got her in trouble, but it's also possible the former Bolshoi ballerina simply ran away to dance. Sections from the perspective of the Petrovas' elderly neighbor, Vera Kuznetsova, detail her own decade in the gulag, as well as conversations Vera had with Katerina that contextualize her disappearance. Though Katerina isn't the book's focus, her absence looms large, informing Yuri and Anya's every action. Meadows paints a poignant portrait of life behind the Iron Curtain, palpably conveying her vividly rendered characters' deprivation, longing, and self-sacrifice. Fans of Megan Abbott's You Will Know Me should take note. Agent: Elisabeth Weed, Book Group. (Nov.)
Kirkus Review
Meadows' absorbing fifth novel follows a promising young Soviet gymnast as she enters a ruthless sports system that emphasizes winning at all costs. It is 1973 in the remote Arctic mining town of Norilsk, where 8-year-old Anya lives with her father, Yuri, who's employed at the local metalworks. Katerina, Anya's mother, disappeared three years ago, and it was speculated at the time that the former Bolshoi ballerina might have returned to Moscow or even defected. Despite the shadow cast by her mother's disappearance and her father's own loss of status within the Communist Party, Anya's gymnastic potential has deemed her "an asset to the Soviet Union." When she is selected to train with Anatoly Popov, Anya embarks on a physical and emotional journey that takes her from a run-down gym in Norilsk to the famed national gymnastics training center at Round Lake in preparation for the 1980 Moscow Olympics. In an alternating storyline, Vera, Anya's elderly neighbor and confidante, recalls her privileged pre-revolutionary childhood and her years in a Siberian labor camp that also killed her husband and son. Writing with a confidence based on excellent research, Meadows vividly depicts the Soviet training system--and its abuses--without taxing readers with too many technical terms. Some of the era's greatest stars (Ludmilla Tourischeva, Nellie Kim, Olga Korbut) make brief appearances, representing a competitive gymnastics that is transitioning from traditional balletic artistry to a more athletic--and riskier--style. If there's a flaw in this smoothly paced novel, it's the lack of conflict motivating its characters to action. Although well drawn, they are passive figures living in a society that allows for no individual agency. Also, the book's final section covering the collapse of the Soviet Union feels rushed. An enlightening portrait of a now-vanished world. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Growing up in the USSR isn't easy, but Anya has it tougher than most. A young Siberian girl with an oft-distracted father and a mother who has been missing for years, Anya knows her only pathway to employment outside of Norilsk's copper mine is through ballet or gymnastics. Small and strong, Anya quickly catches the eye of the state sporting association and begins training full time as a gymnast. Flipping, twisting, and smiling through brutal injuries, Anya soon learns how to block out the pressure cooker environment to find fleeting glimpses of happiness wherever she can. With the Olympics on the horizon, Anya has to reconcile her talents with the long, unknown future. Meadows brings readers on Anya's journey through her earliest gymnastics classes to elite levels of competition, reframing love, loss, and labor through athletic mastery. Meadows skillfully articulates the risks and rewards of high-level competition, the divine feeling of being chosen to represent one's country, and the fragility of the human body. For those who loved Hannah Orenstein's Head over Heels (2020) and Alena Dillon's The Happiest Girl in the World (2021), Winterland is a look back at a generation of Soviet talent, ambition, and sacrifice, inside and outside the gym.
Library Journal Review
Quoting aptly from the poems of Marina Tsvetaeva and liberally slinging Russian vulgarities along with gymnastics lingo, Meadows (I Will Send Rain) captures the risks so recently headlined by Simone Biles and other champions in her fifth novel, which traces the tormented lives of three women against a backdrop of gymnastics in Norilsk, a closed Soviet industrial city in the Arctic. Anya, a child of faithful communist parents, endures the sport's cruel training regimen for the greater glory of the USSR. Her mother, a ballerina, unaccountably disappears from the child's life early on, yet haunts her coming of age. Their neighbor Vera, a gulag survivor struggling with her own grief and guilt, helps raise Anya. Deprivation, betrayal, and fear are inscribed on the characters' worried faces, yet when Anya performs her spectacular routines, smiles cover the hurt. Gymnastics is the fourth actor in the plot, as malign forces darken Anya's love of the sport. A haunting allusion to Stalin's real-life daughter, Svetlana, indicates the deep research supporting the novel. VERDICT Spanning the final decades of the 1900s, Meadows's latest is a genre-bender that fluently integrates sports with accents from political and psychological thrillers. Most novels about gymnastics are written for YA audiences, but this one is for seasoned readers.--Barbara Conaty
