Anya and Milka, friends since first grade, are like sisters when we meet them at age fourteen. At first, she’s blissfully unaware of the changes to come, spending tranquil summer days with her best friend Milka at the family dacha, or country house, just outside Moscow, whose modest apple orchard plays a major role later on. The Orchard’s protagonist, Anya Raneva, is a part of this generation, though she doesn’t know it yet when the book opens. This was “Generation Perestroika,” as author Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry calls it in her debut novel The Orchard, a coming-of-age tale loosely inspired by Anton Chekhov’s final play, The Cherry Orchard. It was a period of change unlike anything the nation had yet witnessed, and, for Soviet youth, it meant hope for the future. With these words he ushered in a new era for the USSR, one in which citizens had more freedoms and economic options. Soon after becoming General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev famously rebranded two Russian words: glasnost and perestroika, meaning openness and restructuring, respectively. The Orchard by Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry
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