Oksana, Behave!: A Novel

“[The] Ukrainian American heroine of this sweet-bitter debut is a wisecracking fatalist who might be counted on to say the inappropriate factor, a bent that turns into extra pronounced as doomed crushes and household crises pile up on the street to maturity.”—O: The Oprah Journal
 
When Oksana and her household transfer from the Ukraine to Florida to start a brand new American life, her physicist father delivers pizza at evening to make ends meet, her cranky mom sits at dwelling all day worrying, and her flamboyant grandmother relishes the eye she will get from males. All Oksana desires is to be as far-off from her household as attainable, to have associates, and to be regular—and although she always tries to do the precise factor, she retains getting in hassle.
 
As she grows up, she continues to misbehave, from considerably unintentionally maiming the school-bus bully, to stealing the much-coveted key to New York Metropolis’s Gramercy Park, to falling in love with a married man. After her grandmother strikes again to Ukraine, Oksana longs for the motherland that looms massive in her creativeness however is a rustic she by no means actually knew.
 
When she visits her grandmother in Yalta and learns about her romantic previous, Oksana involves a brand new understanding of find out how to stay with out inflicting hurt to the individuals she loves. However will Oksana ever fairly study to behave?

Reward for Oksana, Behave!

“Tragicomic and bittersweet . . . an immigrant's coming-of-age story accomplished with brio.”—Kirkus Evaluations

“What luck for readers that Oksana can’t behave! Little satan, infinite imbecile, poor futureless baby—all of the names her displaced, loving household give to her as she crashes and burns and wanders the wilderness of her inheritance, match completely. As outrageous as she is, as humorous and as terrible as she might be, although, in Oksana, Maria Kuznetsova has additionally created a personality of nice ardour and depth—of tragedy, even, too—the very kind that populate the tales of Chekhov and Tolstoy, the poems of Anna Akhmatova, and all the opposite Russian writers Oksana seems to for consolation and firm and a few type of bearing on this absurd world. This novel is a stark, hilarious delight.”—Paul Harding, Pulitzer Prize–successful creator of Tinkers