Thank you kindly to the publishers for this eARC. Alas, I have to say that this one didn't grip me as much as I wanted it to. Given the blurb, and the inextricable link between the author's biographical background and the content, I thought that I was going to love this. I envisioned a Russian "Orange is the New Black," but the characters were flat and the action just wasn't there. I kept wanting Anya to be more... MORE. More angry, more striking, more interesting, more something. I find it particularly difficult to get into a piece when you don't engage with the main character and the same was true here.

This was a tough book to read and finish. I thought the story was very confusing and there were characters that made no sense.
Thanks to netgalley and the publisher for the arc in exchange for my review

this book is amazingly written as an ode to feminism and activism. while reading this book, there are some moments where i thought some things got lost in translation but it made me enjoy it more. the characters are all likeable because they have a very diverse characterization despite having to suffer the same fate of being incarcerated. on the whole, this book is totally a thought-provoking and enjoyable read.

Anya is arrested at an anti-corruption protest in Moscow. For this she is sentenced to 10 days in a special detention center. After arriving in the centre she is greated by her 5 room mates. Whom are all in the detention center for petty things like driving without a license. The book follows Anya on her 10 day stretch, with all of her room mates leaving before she does. They spend the long, I eventful days discussing their lives and building trust and companionship among each other. However, as the days continue Anya starts to have strange nightmare like visions of her other room mates. And she begins to struggle to distinguish between the reality and the visions.

This book has a really simple but interesting concept. Set across the 10 days in which Anya is in prison there isn't a lot that actually happens in the book. Most of it is filled with conversations between the women and a few flashbacks of Anya reminiscing. However, this didn't lead to a boring book, in contrast I absolutely raced through this book and found myself enjoying the depth of the characters that this slow paced environment brought out. It's not a setting that I've read many books from but definitely one I would go towards in the future. A great debut book that I suggest giving a go.

I was pretty excited about this book, but I found the writing not as strong as I would have liked. It was funny enough but I also thought my idea of a Russian prison and this portrayal of one were just not even on the same map.

I've been letting this story marinate in my mind for two weeks, because it's that good, that original, that aware. Anya is a woman who identifies as lesbian, but she is not out in every setting, including the one where her body and mind are in this novel. She is a young Russian woman beginning a sentence for ten days' detention. She attended a protest and when it was broken up, others got released and Anya did not. She walks into a large cell full of bunks, radio running all day long with music she hates and she meets her cellmates in Women's Cell Number 3. Anya is very bright, college educated, with a wealthy father who is divorced from her mother. He is only intermittently involved with Anya. Her relationship with her mother is decent but complicated.

To set the stage for what it means to be in a Russian detention center we quickly learn that three of Anya's cellmates are in for driving without a license. One for not paying alimony. One for swearing at a cop. So, there are five of them and Anya makes six. For much of her stay, she interacts with and observes them. She has long periods when she thinks about pieces of her life, her closest friends, her crushes, her college experiences, her mistakes. Some memories are funny. Many are unusual. Most reflect the childhood and college years of a young girl struggling somewhat with her identity and how to "be" in the world. The monotony of being in jail for ten days and the need for the small comforts of an occasional hot shower and phone time each day are palpable. The fact that on some shifts, the staff is at least decent and on others they are authoritarian and unhelpful becomes part of the emotional layers this book just adds on steadily.

Partway through her sentence, Anya goes what we might call stir crazy, beginning to have visions or hallucinations that might be dreams, but take up her thoughts for periods of time. Mostly, she eats the food which, while salty is better than she thought it would be and reads and just…. experiences all of this. Yarmysh is fully inside both Anya's head and creates for her characters in Women's Cell Number 3 unlike any Anya has met before. She is not "out" with them. One of her cellmates is lesbian. One seems mentally ill. One is very obviously obsessed with herself, spoiled. One has served hard time in the past. Tea is made from water kept in a hot water bottle. Everyone seems to smoke. Anya quit awhile ago. There's a window that can be opened to the yard.

Time creeps along, as Anya learns pieces of information about each of her cellmates. Their stories both invade her thoughts and are apart from her. She is as alone as can be even though the six women are together through most of this book. This is a totally engrossing, oddly fast paced novel with a complex, interesting character in Anya. I personally like her a lot and root for her. But she's made mistakes and done some unlikeable things. She has also been at times a victim of someone else's highly unlikeable behavior. She examines these past moments/periods as dispassionately as she considers her cellmates. She copes, except when intrusive thoughts come. It is not normal to be in jail. It is something you adjust to and live through. And this is only ten days, but Yarmysh paints for us an engrossing personal experience. Everything is shared through Anya's perspective and it is all fascinating. You end up wanting to know what happens next with every single person, even if Anya doesn't want to know more than what she has learned. The writing is original and very visual because it's all written in third person omniscient. Ten days in Women's Cell Number 3. It's well worth spending the time to read this hard, yet lyrical book. Highly recommend.

The Incredible Events in Women's Cell Number Three, by Kira Yarmysh

At first sight this looks like a not that fictional account of a Russian prison, told by someone who knows about the country’s politics, opposition, and prisons.
The storyline however is not as straight forward and the “incredible events” don’t refer to the treatment of inmates or their stories, but rather to the element of magical realism in the novel.
We meet Anya as she is brought into a detention centre. The reason for her ten day sentence is having taken part in a protest.
Political protests and Russian prison are something the author Kira Yarmysh knows about first hand. As the press secretary for Alexey Navalny, the opposition in Russia, she’s been arrested several times and has spent time in prison before living in exile now.
We follow as Anya goes through the routine of paperwork and having all her belongings checked before being taken to her cell, Cell Number Three, shared with five other women.
At first, it seems Anya is different from them all, from the delinquents she has been put into a cell with. However, we slowly find out that each of them has their story, and they are no more criminals than Anya. They have equally short sentences and are in for petty crimes such as driving without a licence. Most of them are quite young, some married (one for the third time); one has addiction problems, another finances her lifestyle and aesthetic surgeries by sleeping with men.
Anya’s own life is revealed in flashbacks ranging from youth at home to university years. We learn about her rebel years, her version of a ménage à trois, and the act that almost cost her the internship at the ministry of Foreign Affairs, though it all has little to do with her current life or why she ended up in this cell.
While we are taken through the day-to-day life inside the detention centre – breakfast, lunch, the loud radio, the hour for phones, exercise time, showers on Thursdays – weird things start happening at night. Or at least, Anya is seeing or imagining them. Neither her nor us know how much of this is real. And this is the disappointing part of the book: It takes what was an uneventful but interesting account of almost true facts into a different and unnecessary realm.
This part of the story is further developed towards the end of the book, as Anya’s cellmates are being released and she is left alone waiting for her own release date and unfortunately becomes the heart of the story instead of focusing on the repetitive every day of the prison cell.

I very much enjoyed this look inside a women's detention center in Moscow. Yarmysh, taking inspiration from her own time in lockup as a consequence of being the press secretary of the opposition leader Alexei Navalny, is a compelling writer. Anya is locked up after being falsely accused of organizing an anti-corruption protest- she is the scapegoat for the large group originally detained. She joins the only women's cell in the detention center, where she meets several other women from many different backgrounds, all of whom are in for very minor things like driving without a license. We get insights into all their lives on the outside, as well as the daily life in the detention center. I quickly realized that I would be content if the entire book was just the women in the cell talking, but Yarmysh manages to take us into Anya, the protagonist's, previous life through flashbacks.

I read several reviews that said they didn't like the flashbacks or the use of magical realism, but it worked for me. If you face severe corruption and the pettiness of people with power over you every day, I think the magical realism aspect becomes far more attractive.

I'm not an expert on Russian politics, but there were a lot of nuances in this book about different perspectives. If you don't like the current regime, you might instead like Stalin, or just leave the country, or just find ways to profit under the corrupt system, or, like Anya and Yarmysh, you might risk your safety in attempt to make a change. This book is a snapshot of life in modern Russia, and I very much appreciated it.

Yarmysh has clearly thought a great deal about her own experiences in Russian prison cells and incorporated them into this novel. The protagonist Anya, finds herself in for a relatively short sentence- 10 days- but it's life altering as she meets women she would not have otherwise and experiences psychological (only way I can think to describe it) issues. Unfortunately, this fell flat for me not because of the writing but because I could not connect with the other characters, who felt less well rounded than they should have been. Thanks to netgalley for the ARC.

Kira Yarmysh's The Incredible Events in Women's Call Number Three, set in a Russian detention center, has received mixed reviews. One GR reviewer calls it "quite a page turner," while another reader noted that she had "hoped for so much more from this book." Me? I'm disappointed. With a mixed ensemble cast of characters the book has the potential to go in many interesting directions. Instead it focuses on main character Anya, who is serving a ten-day sentence resulting from a public protest. There are five other women in Cell Three with Anya, but readers never get to see inside their heads the way they do with Anya's.

The fact is, Anya is not a particularly interesting character. The novel bounces back and forth between events in the cell and Anya's mostly unspoken recounting of her own life—and that life is a weak center around which to build a book. Anya leans toward lesbian, though is not exclusively so, and we get detailed memories of her crushes, jealousies, lack of forethought, and manipulation. Her political awakening, which led to her arrest, receives far less attention, so it's hard to see much dignity in her. She comes across as a late-twenties disaffected and self-centered youth. The book has moments of a menacing magical realism, but they seem marginalized, as if the writer wanted to create something innovative, but kept getting distracted.

Promotional materials describe describe this novel as "A brilliant exploration of what it means to be marginalized both as an independent woman and in an increasingly intolerant Russia in particular, and a powerful prison story that renews a grand Russian tradition." I'm not expert in Russian literature, but I didn't feel as though I were reading a new milestone. I felt as if I was reading post-teen-angst-with-a-pinch-of-horror, which I don't find at all "grand."

Because I'm curious about contemporary Russian fiction I would read additional work by this writer, hoping for something that I found more resonant. I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher; the opinions are my own.

This one was a mixed bag for me. The basic premise and look into the detention center and the different characters was great. But the novel gets a bit detailed by hallucinations and flashbacks at times

I enjoyed reading the Incredible Events in Women's Cell Number 3. I was not expecting the hallucinations, so at times I wasn't sure what was "real" and what wasn't. This insight into a Moscow prison was very heavy but super interesting to read.

This was an interesting departure from the usual novels I read and I am glad I read it, but I'm not sure I can say that I enjoyed it. I hated the hallucinations experienced by the main character and the ending befuddled me.

Reading the blurb about this book, I was really excited as the author was Alexey Navalny's press secretary. I figured that she must have had an insightful gaze into the Moscow prisons. In addition, like the main character in the novel, she went to the Moscow State Institute of International Relations. Her professional work with Navalny also led to numerous arrests and exposure to the corruption of the system.
In the novel, Anya is arrested and given a jail sentence of 10 days for participating in an unsanctioned government protest rally. In Cell Number 3, a desolate room with bunkbeds, she is exposed to 5 other cellmates who hail from all different levels of society and strata. The reader experiences their back stories as they operate like a dorm room, sharing tea, playing games, dwelling in gossip and political issues. Daily life is exposed and the inhumanity and absurdness of their arrests and subsequent struggles within the detention center become a major spotlight that floods across the pages. The book moves along as one by one they are released from their cell and Anya is the last person left.
I had hoped for so much more from this book. Anya has hallucinations while detained which seemed basically irrelevant to the story, making a minor minor point. If anything, I felt they detracted from the message the author was trying to convey. The characters, although very distinct from one another felt awkwardly inserted in the novel to score a point on diversity; however, they felt contrived and I wasn't able to engage with them. Flashbacks of Anya's sexual and work life didn't interest me at all and that constituted a large part of the book. Sigh! There was so much promise here-it is too bad that the punch never occurred.

A young woman is arrested and placed in a detention center. Interesting slice of life in contemporary Russia, balancing between real events and mythology.

Unlike anything I have read before. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an advanced copy of this book.

Although this is not a particularly long novel, it definitely leaves a powerful and unforgettable mark long after the reader has finished. Following a young Russian woman arrested and sentenced to a detention center, this is a remarkable and raw look at life in a totalitarian country. A must read for anyone interested in contemporary Russian stories.


Many thanks to Grove Atlantic and NetGalley for a digital review copy in exchange for an honest review.