Diana's Reviews > Lights All Night Long

This novel tells the story of Ilya, an exchange student from a very dark place in Russia, a town that had been built around a gulag, to Louisiana. He's always been a good student, and he worked very hard at his English in order to get this opportunity, but he doesn't enjoy it. His older brother Vladimir, back in Russia, has confessed to being a serial killer of three young women, and he's imprisoned. The narrative switches back and forth between Ilya in Russia in the past to Ilya in America, trying to figure out who really killed the girls, since he is absolutely sure that it wasn't Vladimir.

The mystery is too tidy, but I don't really care about that, as I'm not a mystery person. What I liked about this was Ilya's observations of the United States and its people, and I also liked the descriptions of his bleak hometown. A problem with the book is that I very much disliked Vladimir, and this made me not care if he got out of the peril he found himself in. Every time he spoke, he was saying something demeaning about women, and while that might be realistic when it comes to some young male characters, it kind of made me not care if he rotted in jail instead of getting out and killing himself with opiates.