Ukrainian Ladies
It is August of 1963, the year of the Taylor/Burton film epic Cleopatra, showcasing a passion too grand to be contained on the movie screen. The women of the Kalyna Beach cottage community gather for gin and gossip, merchandising the current racy bestsellers amidst themselves as they seek a brief escape from the predictable rhythms of children and chores. But dramatic change is coming this summer as innocence falters and the desire for modify reaches a boiling point, threatening to disrupt the warm, sweet, heady days and the lives of parents and children, family and friends, forever.
From Publishers WeeklyThe Ukrainian-Canadian housewives of idyllic 1960s Kalyna Beach, Ontario, find that show business scandal has far-reaching power in this latest from Canadian novelist Keefer, her basi published in the U.S. While their husbands work, former model Sonia Martyn and friends spend the summer of 1963 watching their children on the beach and reading racy books to talk about over Friday cocktails, while the kids test the limits of their mothers’ supervisory attainments and conventional Ukrainian values. Moms and daughters similar have become enchanted by the new film Cleopatra and the scandalous love affair among stars Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. When the beautiful, sad wife of a local millionaire embarks on her own misbegotten affair, the ladies of Kalyna Beach feel their intimate world shift, opening up novel future prospects or potentials for freedom and betrayal. Keefer neatly captures the security and claustrophobia of immigrant communities, but diffuses her story’s power with too a good deal of points of view. Just as the ladies’ books cannot match the drama in their lives, this story only begins to capture the personal cost of immigration and assimilation. (Jan.)
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From BooklistCanada in the 1960s is the setting for Keefer’s melancholy tale of a group of Ukrainian immigrants whose lives are conspicuously connected—by blood or circumstance. For the crucial characters, the excitement of relocation to the Great White North has faded into a steady, at times numbing rhythm made up of raising families and going to work. Their one escape is summers expended at an idyllic lakeside resort, where the women read and talk about racy books, and their children begin to explore the mysteries of the opposite sex. (The husbands only come up on weekends, disrupting the women’s scandalous literary pursuits.) Sasha Plotsky is the ringleader of the reading group, the jealousy of some of the women because she always says just what she thinks. But her best friend, Sonia Martyn, a former model trapped in a lackluster marriage, is the novel’s driving force, spending the summer attempting to keep the peace amongst a cluster of ardent personalities. Readers of Gilmore’s Golden Country (2006) will find much to like in this poignant saga of real life and unrealized dreams. –Allison Block
Review”* ‘The Ladies’ Lending Library satisfies in the way the best sort of summer reading does – like wild strawberries, or blueberries gathered in the sun, or cold spring water gulped on a hot day.’ Quill & Quire * ‘Kulyk Keefer’s narrative has historical and generational sweep… A masterful rendering of a group of women in crisis.’ National Post (Canada)”
Most helpful client reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
 Lots of tertiary stories…
By Empark
This book is fascinating. It’s unquestionably “chick lit”–lots of interactions amidst women but also interactions among families (parents and kids and siblings and cousins and friends…). There’s a few major themes but it’s one of the tertiary stories that will move you and make you think. It’s set among assorted Ukranian immigrants that live for the summer in cottages along a fictional lake in Ontario. Much of the action is related to the last two weeks of summer. You may unquestionably picture the women and kids and all that is going on. The cover photo is misleading–I don’t think it’s supposed to be the 39 year old main protagonist…and it doesn’t in truth fit her 16 year old mother’s helper (who is always in a bikini) either. If you want a haunting beach read and you’re a little mesmerized in immigrant stories in 60′s Canada then this is the book.
3 of 4 persons found the following review helpful.
 Where’s the Story?
By topcat44
Having grown up in the 60′s I wanted to like this book; but found it to be very mixing up and boring to read. There were too numerous characters, and very little story. Consequently, I thought it was difficult to keep people straight much less get fascinated in any of them. Maybe it would have made sense if I could have stuck it out to the end, but I in the long run gave up reading half way through! I am sorry I purchased this one. My counsel is if it sounds good and you think you want to undertake it–get it from the library!
2 of 3 persons found the following review helpful.
Disappointing – Enough Said
By SixtiesHippie
I picked up this book back in the Spring of this year, shortly after it hit bookshelves. However, I didn’t commence reading it until mid-November, taking into account that I had other books to still read. However, by the basi few pages, I was anything, but impressed. The novel lacked an actual plot, and you veritably felt like the story was going nowhere. It was filled with dissimilar points of views of the a good deal of female characters, and I found myself getting lost, confused, altho most of all, impatient. Soon after, I put the book down, and never looked back. The book perfectly bored me to tears. However, I do give credit to the fact that the stories were fantastically detailed, and well-written, but sadly, there didn’t seem like there was much of a point to them. When I basi got the book, I knew it took place in the 1960′s, which is a decade I am very fasinated by, and I hoped to see what life was like back then. I didn’t see much of a difference, though.
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