Book of the Month: Moonlight in Odessa, by Janet Skeslien Charles

Three places occupy the heart of Janet Skeslien Charles’s effervescent debut novel, Moonlight in Odessa: Odessa, the cosmopolitan Ukrainian Black Sea port; the U.S.; and a place that has no geographical boundaries but is sought by virtually everyone—the metaphorical land of Love.

Our principal guide to these three is ambitious, attractive, articulate Daria, who has a degree in mechanical engineering but finds herself, at the beginning of the book, working as a secretary for a demanding Western executive at an international import company. This executive demands that Daria sleep with him, and her strategy to avoid this fate—introducing him to her wily neighbor, Olga—propels a succession of events that reveal some of the primary fantasies and realities of life in Odessa, the U.S., and Love.

Odessa is presented as a historically cultured place of high art (the opera house is the third most splendid in the world, we learn on numerous occasions), elegant architecture, impeccable manners, and intelligent, Akhmatova-quoting citizens who once cultivated devious ways to survive the privations of life in the Soviet Union and continue to use these to good effect in the new Ukraine of materialism and mafia protection.

The U.S. enters the novel as a place of escape, first for the determined Odessan email-order brides who are willing to forsake family and home for the prospect of married life with an American, and then for Daria herself, when she develops an online relationship with an email-order bride client from Northern California—and begins to dream of freedom, prosperity, and worldly fulfillment in that faraway land.

Which brings us to that other faraway land, Love. Charles movingly evokes the hills, valleys, oceans, and forests of this elusive territory. By the end of her tale, I felt deeply drawn to an Odessa I’ve never known and a San Francisco I’ve known for decades—and that third place, whose boundless byways exert still an irrepressible allure.