Wow this was not at all what I was expecting, it was so much more! A beautifully written and layered coming of age story that pulled me and didn't let go. Like another reviewer wrote I did get some Death of Vivek Oji feeling from this story, and that just makes it all that much more compelling as the necessity for representation across different cultural backgrounds is intricate and unique to each story. I can't wait to start seeing reviews of this book, particularly in the wake of so much juxtaposition to what's happening in the world right now.

Thank you so much for an advanced copy of this book!

The intriguingly-titled Little Foxes Took Up Matches is the debut novel from Katya Kazbek, a bilingual Russian/English writer and translator.

Mitya lives in Moscow at a time of political turmoil, with his mother, grandmother, and father. He feels incredibly out of place, and harbors desires to dress as a woman. Two events radically change his path; a homeless friend is murdered, and his alcoholic, abusive cousin takes us residence in Mitya’s home.

Mitya’s story is intertwined with a retelling of a Russian folktale about Koshcei the Deathless. The story somewhat reflects Mitya’s journey, but I mostly just enjoyed these fantastical sections as a separate entity.

Little Foxes is a great novel. Mitya is a wonderful character; he is warm, naive, but ultimately liberated. Like all of us, he is hoping to discover his true self, despite the constant judgement of others. Mitya’s father is an especially fearsome force in the book, often taking out his dissatisfaction with life on those around him. And the abuse Mitya endured at the hands of his cousin, Vovka, a Chechen war veteran, is horrific.

Little Foxes Took Up Matches can be appreciated on many levels; as a bildungsroman, a political novel, a murder mystery, or a fantasy novel. It is completely unique, in an accessible way. Kazbek has created a wonderful character in Mitya, and I would be very intrigued to read Mitya’s ongoing adventures.

This is an unusual coming of age story that merges fact and fable in 1990s Moscow. Mitya's life is changed when, at 2 years old, he swallows a needle. It becomes something more to him as he grows-it's a connection to Koschei the Deathless who achieves immortality by hiding a needle. Mitya explores gender identity early, wearing makeup and women's clothes, and then he's assaulted by a relative. When a homeless man he's befriended goes missing, Mitya discovers there are people out there who don't care whether he's a boy or a girl but only that he is himself. And throughout this exploration there's the story of Koschei. This takes a bit of patience but it's fascinating in its way. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. For fans of literary fiction.

Wow, first, I want to say I loved reading the book. It was such an emotional (but in a good way) journey with Mitya. I admire and love Mitya's determination to help those who he cares for and loves and to be his true self, despite what happens to him and what is happening around him in Russia. I love his bravery, his kindness, and his attitude towards life. Also, alternating between Mitya's story and the surrealist story was a unique and awesome touch to the narration. I can't wait for more from Katya Kazbek!

Thank you, NetGalley and Tin House, for providing me an advanced reader copy of this book!

Parallels a folktale with the story of a Russian boy who is conflicted about his gender and facing trauma and criticism at home.

This is an unpredictable coming-of-age story told with humor born of absurdity and deep compassion.

Mitya, a young boy in 1990s Moscow, is living in a run-down one-bedroom apartment with his parents, his grandmother, and an alcoholic cousin. Mitya is somewhat feminine in appearance and is not entirely certain if he is a boy or a girl or maybe both.

Despite neglect and abuse at home, Mitya does find friendship and understanding with Valerka, a street drunk who feeds the crows, and with Marina, a young and struggling Ukrainian woman who becomes his best friend.

I think there is probably much of the novel that I have missed, as I was unfamiliar with the Russian folklore surrounding Koschei the Deathless; the punk bands and artists of Moscow of that era (Viktor Tsoi, Yanka, Straw Raccoons ... with guitarist Anya Bernstein who is now a professor at Harvard); and Russian words and phrases. (For example, ebaniy pizdets, which in the Cyrillic is ёбаный пиздец, which means ... oh ... never mind ... a vulgarity. Another example is Devchonka, which is Russian for girl or little girl, but also used for an effeminate or gay man.) On the other hand, I never felt like I was lost ... just that maybe I would love this even more if I had a more comprehensive background.

In the end, this is a story of one boy and his family, living in near-poverty in a country in political turmoil and economic ruin; and it is masterfully well done.

In this brilliantly written novel, Katya Kazbek writes a beautiful coming of age story that makes you sit and your chair and not want to stop reading.

Encompassing the entire book with characters you can empathize with, this book is one to definitely re-read. I really enjoyed the different character dynamics and the family relationships. This amazing, intriguing, queer fairy tale is one you'd definitely want to read. A coming-of-age story mixed with literary aspects and family dynamics, check, please!

As we follow our main character, Mitya, through his self-discovery, we get more and more sucked into this story and it just brings you into this world of fantasy and Mitya's life.

With parallel chapters acting as Mitya's dreams, this book gives context and closure that you are waiting for throughout the entire book.

all in all: a good read, probably will read again very soon. 3.5 stars.

Translator Katya Kazbek’s debut novel is rife with fantasy. In a literal sense, this comes from the retold fairy tale interwoven throughout. More impressively, the atmosphere Kazbek creates in her rendering of emotionally desolate post-USSR Moscow manages often to capture and maintain that feeling.
When Mitya is two years old, his grandmother loses a needle while sewing and his family assumes he must have swallowed it. This leads Mitya to draw parallels to the story of Koschei the Deathless (Koschei is a villainous character, and Mitya’s self-identification with him is revealing). Koschei’s soul is hidden inside of a needle, which is hidden in an increasingly bizarre array of nesting objects chained up and buried on the island. Koschei can’t be killed unless the needle is broken, similar in concept to the heel of Achilles (“That’s way more convenient than having a lousy heel,” Kazbek muses, in the novel’s opening). Mitya secretly believes the needle he must have swallowed has made him special, and maybe even invincible.
Life, however, is not so easy as one might expect it to be for someone in possession of an immortality needle. Mitya discovers at a very young age that he doesn’t know how he fits into a world categorized by binary gender. He likes to dress up as a girl, but he isn’t sure what this means—does he want to be a girl? Does he only want to be a girl sometimes? What’s the difference between boys and girls, and are those the only options, anyway?
The queer story Kazbek tells is a beautiful one, equal parts confusion and exploration, but peppered with gemlike moments of realization as well. The most striking aspect of Mitya’s journey towards self-discovery is its unhurriedness and its lack of concern with labels. Mitya is more concerned about figuring out what it is that makes him feel at home with himself than he is any sort of rigid categorization. At the same time, I appreciate the prescience of these thoughts to Mitya. Although Kazbek is unhurried in her treatment of this aspect of the story, these questions of his identity matter deeply to Mitya, as they often do when one first starts asking them.
Parallel chapters (denoted with spelled-out numbers, e.g. “one,” “two,” as opposed to the main chapters in numerals) offer what is at times a necessary reprieve from the bleakness of Mitya’s day-to-day existence. These are implied to take place in Mitya’s dreams, and tell a strange, fantastical story about Koschei, the aforementioned immortal villain. In this re-telling, Koschei is the heir to an all-male dynasty of Koschei villains, and doesn’t feel very villainous, or very manly. The imagery used throughout is sufficiently bizarre and magical in the odd and sometimes even grotesque way that old folk- and fairy-tales (as well as dreams) so often are. They are not the heart of the novel but serve to illuminate it, and drawing connections between the two stories is interesting and fruitful.

Mitya is at his strongest when he is at his most childlike, I think, which seems to fit with a line at the end of the first chapter: “Mitya was a child, and children, though they quite often possess the clearest, least obstructed view of reality, are never asked to present it.”
For all of Mitya’s strengths as a character, there are times when suspension of disbelief becomes difficult, when Mitya seems a little too wise and conscious for an eleven-or-twelve year old boy (even younger, in the opening chapters).
I am well aware that abuse, poverty, and the challenges of an awful childhood will cause someone to mature—in some sense—very quickly. Lest it seem that I contradict the point I just made: Mitya’s childlike views and his struggle to understand the world are sources of wonder and beauty, and yes, of a certain kind of wisdom. That being said, there are select moments where Mitya’s social sensitivity—which I would argue is not an aspect of that childish proclivity for the truth—seems to go far beyond his years. Mitya acts as though despite his general lack of understanding of the world at large, he somehow has the astute social awareness of someone far older and more experienced than he is, especially given his social isolation. These moments are small, however, and others may not find them terribly disruptive.
Kazbek’s characters are her strength: take Mitya’s grandmother, Alyssa Vitalyevna, a very funny character whose every word seems completely inevitable because she has been created so truthfully. Marina is another particularly shining example, a young Ukrainian woman suffering as she tries to make ends meet after fleeing home.
It’s astonishing the way that some characters, who appear so very little, can live on so vividly for the duration of the book—this is a recurring theme. Examples include a handsome and kind homeless boy or the child-turned-lead-singer of a popular underground band. Small intersections with people follow Mitya like ghosts, both friendly and malevolent.

The book centers primarily on Mitya and his thoughts but occasionally glimpses are offered into the lives of others. This sifting through the thoughts of the supporting cast sets the stage with texture, depth, and tenderness. It allows us to sympathize, on some level, with everyone, and serves to make the world Mitya lives in feel real, almost tangible.
There is deep humanity in the equality with which these thoughts are exposed. Early on in the book Mitya suffers abuse from his older cousin, Vovka, who has come back from the war with one less arm, horrifically traumatized by the battlefield. We are treated to a grueling description of the act, one of the first truly harrowing passages in the novel (of several to come).
The narration, though, has no qualms about letting the reader inside Vovka’s head, notably in a later passage:

“When it was done, Vovka lay back as the realization [of] what he had done crept in, slowly overtaking him like poison. Mitya’s sobs had slowed down, and he would fall asleep any minute, leaving Vovka all alone with his terror. The terror that had started back in the war and refused to leave, that became the only mode of existence in this hell that was populated with rotting corpses, dead comrades, enemy combatants, and the worst monster of all, himself.”

This is not a story interested in binary distinctions of good and evil, even when it would allow the reader to sleep more soundly. Little Foxes Took Up Matches is a compelling and rewarding queer coming-of-age tale with its excellent dreamlike atmosphere, though it is not for the faint of heart.

I choose to request the ARC of Katya Kazbek's latest book "Little Foxes Took Up Matches" based on its unique title, and am extremely glad that I did request and receive it. Although I am only minimally versed in Russian culture, and the USSR' s collapse, Kazbek provided enough background so that i did not feel lost in my knowledge of what was unfolding as the story progressed, while still keeping it from becoming a boring history lesson. I also enjoyed how the story was told along side of a Russian fairy tale, where certain comparisons were made.

I would recommend this book to everyone who has an open mind to what actually goes on in the real world. Sometimes things are difficult to overcome, but hopefully there will be brighter days ahead.!

Little Foxes Took Up Matches delivers the feel of a fairytale in the most ancient and sinister way. A dreamlike, but dark feel in a more modern story complete with an LGTBQ discovery story.

Little Foxes Took Up Matches by Katya Kazbek. Thanks to Tin House @tin_house and NetGalley @netgalley for letting me read a digital ARC of this book.
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If you (like me) loved Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart or The Death of Vivek Oji by Akwaeke Emezi, you will want to pick up Katya Kazbek's debut Little Foxes Took Up Matches.
Sophia Shalmiyev in her blurb perfectly described the novel as "A luscious modern queer fable drawn in post-Soviet Russian red lipstick."
Mixed in with a fairytale retelling, Little Foxes is the coming of age story of Mitya, a boy in post-Soviet Russia. Mitya is precocious and charming, but living in very difficult circumstances in a rundown Moscow apartment (trigger warning for sexual abuse) and struggling against strict gender conventions. Kazbek writes with compassion, honesty, contradiction and a bit of surrealism.
I found this book so compulsively readable that I could hardly put it down.

This book was strongest in its folklore-inspired segments, and you really felt how that was an escape for Mitya from his difficult circumstances. Mitya is such an interesting and well-written character that I couldn't help but be pulled into this novel, although at times things got so bleak and depressing that it was a bit difficult to push through. However, I think that speaks more to my own personal preference than to any flaw of the book. The characters are richly detailed and realistic, the relationships are complex, and the historical context is something I haven't read much about. I especially liked reading about Mitya's quest for justice for his friend and what that reveals to the reader about this cultural context, and simultaneously serves as a vehicle for growth and maturity in Mitya. His complicated love for his family is portrayed well. The prose is very skilled, especially during the folklore/fairytale sections. A great read but a bit difficult and depressing for me, and I feel the slow pacing in the second half left me feeling like things were a bit of a slog.

this book married interesting things together -- family, friendship, and class in the aftermath of the USSR's collapse, gender dysphoria / exploration, all narrated from the perspective of an innocent child in the middle of very heavy life circumstances. I have to say I appreciate the writing and the development of the setting, a rich inner-life for the protagonist, but this probably falls too squarely in the queer suffering category for me. Everyone is looking for something different in a novel, and others may love it, because there's certainly hope here, too, but it was a difficult one for me.
TW: child sexual abuse

I was absolutely thrilled by the writing the story that drew me in..I was so absorbed I did not want to read the last pages.A book an author I will be recommending l#netgalley#ww.Norton

A dark, contemporary folktale of a queer, coming of age. At times, painfully brutal in is depiction of family, gender roles, and abuse. Katya Kazbek is a powerful voice to be reckoned with.

The writing is wonderful and characters are fascinating. It's a captivating story. Unfortunately I disagree with the author's thoughts and I find them to be quite problematic. It was an interesting perspective, but definitely not for me. I pushed myself to finish this fast, and really wanted to like it, but not everything is for everyone.

Multi-layered and absorbing, this tender, yet disturbing coming-of-age novel is a look into contemporary Russia, emerging gender identification, friendship and family. Part brilliant fable and part mystery, I consumed this wonderful novel in just a few sittings. My guess is this novel will find a wide audience with readers on the cutting edge of new literary fiction.
My thanks to Net Galley for the ARC.

Phew! What a novel.

I'm conflicted -- on the one hand, there's something brilliant and original at work here. But, on the other, I thought the novel sagged a bit. I felt the end lacked the emotional resonance I had been expecting, and the prose was somewhat simple, with a lot of telling and not showing. The beginning quarter is thrilling, but that energy and humor quickly dissipates. For the most part, the fairy tale chapters were also not the most engaging.

I will say the story is on another level -- this is probably what kept me most engaged, how the novel quickly becomes a whodunnit/murder mystery (though the reveal gets flattened by its nonchalance. There was no big moment afterwards, no ripples felt to this reveal). Regardless, following Mitya as they went through their own gender / sexuality discoveries was a joy. I think Katya Kazbek is a huge talent, and I look forward to seeing what she does next.

Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC of this book. This was a wonderful story. Heartbreaking definitely, at times. Very unique. I will definitely be looking for more from this author. Kochei is one of my all time favorite legends.