In time-travel novel 'Atomic Anna,' three women attempt to prevent the Chernobyl disaster

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With “Atomic Anna,” rbarenbaum has created a saga that manages to be both sweeping and riveting. For literature critic Carol Iaciofano Aucoin, it’s time travel done right:

When fictional time travel is done right — think Jack Finney’s classic “Time and Again,” or Stephen King’s “11/22/63” — it is hard to resist. There’s the allure of improving history , and the inherent tension of unintended consequences. Any event you change, no matter how small, is a domino ready to tap the next event, and the next.Barenbaum, who lives in Brookline, does not seem to do anything small.

Anna lands a few years in the future, Dec. 8, 1992, at a science research station on Mount Aragats in Armenia. Inside the building is her grown daughter Molly, whom Anna has not seen since Molly was a baby in the 1950s. Molly has been shot, and tells Anna “The reaction caused the jump. We’re out of time.” Soon after, Anna is pulled back to 1986 and to her apartment, now holding her amplifier with burned hands.

In the early 1950s, Anna had helped her best friend Yulia and her husband Lazar flee to America and raise Anna’s baby Molly as their own, to give her a bigger life than she would have had in the Soviet Union. Growing up in the tightknit Little Russia neighborhood of Philadelphia, Molly remembers her adoptive parents reading Life magazine “as a set of instructions on what Americans were supposed to think and do.

Fortunately, Raisa is preternaturally self-sufficient, walking past her sleeping mother to get herself to elementary school each day. Raisa also shares her grandmother’s scientific prowess, and then some. She teaches herself from library books borrowed or stolen .Even more fortunate, Raisa occasionally has someone appear in her life who helps set her on a wider, safer path; these include a keenly observant teacher and a boy whose family fled Chernobyl and settled in a house on Raisa’s street.

 

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