"Each winter I'm sure will be my last. Dust to dust, I find myself saying as my frozen fingers struggle to hold the pen with which I write these words to you, Ashes to ashes, I mutter, and nothing but suffering and joy in between. I've had my share. Hot and sharp -- I taste it still in the blood that fills my mouth when I cough." Miriam is a nineteen-year-old imprisoned in Siberia following the Russian Revolution of 1905. Reaching out to the young daughter whom she gave up at birth, Miriam weaves a haunting tale of life in a small Jewish village during the last days of imperial Russia and of a community caught between the rich yet rigid traditions of the past and the frightening, unfamiliar ways of a society desperately trying to reinvent itself. Rejected by her suicidal mother and abandoned by her father at birth, Miriam is marked as an outcast in her village from the beginning. Reunited with her father when he marries Tsila, a haughty and complex woman whose beauty has been marred by the hand of divine anger, Miriam searches to unveil the secrets of her birth in a place of mystery and superstition, where everyone seems to know the truth that eludes her. Your Mouth Is Lovely moves seamlessly from picturesque but impoverished villages, where fife is ruled by the iron hand of God and the equally powerful grip of Fate, to the slums of teeming Kiev, where a seething anger is about to change the course of Russian history. A story of epic human drama, Your Mouth Is Lovely is a poetic, dreamy novel with a darkly magical sheen. Editorial Reviews From Publishers Weekly Like a doomed love affair, the Russian Revolution proceeds according to its own inexorable logic in this haunting U.S. debut by Canadian Richler (Throw Away Angels). Within hours of Miriam Lev's birth into a swampy shtetl in prerevolutionary Minsk, her mother dispatches her to a wet nurse and drowns herself. Six years later, Miriam is halfheartedly reclaimed by her father, Aaron, "the Stutterer," newly married to the young seamstress Tsila. With her grotesque facial birthmark and a disposition "sour as spoiled milk," Tsila fulfills the job requirements for wicked stepmother. But this remarkably complex character educates Miriam "to be a human being among human beings" and instills in her the urge to escape ("Nice is somewhere else"). She also binds Miriam to her own family, especially to her rebellious sister Bayla, now scandalously cohabitating with the agitator Leib in Kiev. Convinced that poverty, pogroms and mounting political unrest are making Russia uninhabitable, Tsila decides they'll emigrate to Argentina. But late in 1904, just months before the outbreak of revolution, she sends Miriam to Kiev to find Bayla a quest that leads to a Siberian political prison. Weaving together political and cultural history, magical realism and the resigned mordancy of Jewish humor, Richler has created a world that seems totally inhabited, but poised to self-destruct. Too many tangential incidents and indistinguishable minor characters crowd the novel, but in Tsila, Bayla and especially in Miriam, Richler has created unforgettable, deeply nuanced characters, freethinking dreamers whose revolutionary activities feel both historically inevitable and mysteriously personal. Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal It's 1911-only six years before the fall of the Russian Empire. And Miriam is writing a journal that she hopes will eventually make its way to her young daughter, living with Miriam's Aunt Bayla in Canada. Unfortunately for Miriam, she is incarcerated in the bleakest Siberian prison camp under a life sentence for having engaged in revolutionary activities. Miriam tells her story in a succession of flashbacks interspersed with the brief journal entries. We are soon drawn in by the peculiar circumstances of Miriam's life-her mother's suicide at her birth; her adoption by a peasant family; readmittance several years later to her father's household with his new wife, Tsila (Bayla's older sister); and then Miriam's journey from the shtetl to the Ukrainian capital of Kiev. In Kiev, she believes her life will have a new beginning: "No one knew me in Kiev, no one cared who I was, where I came from. It could be dangerous, I supposed, to be so alone, but I felt no danger, only joy." Instead, she unwittingly gets involved in the revolutionary movement, which is her undoing. Richler has created a vital, credible world that seamlessly demonstrates the interconnectedness of humanity. Such is the power of her craft that Miriam's story transcends the mundane, propelling this magnificent novel into the company of Dickens and Dostoyevski. Richler's first novel, Throw Away Angels, was shortlisted for the Arthur Ellis Award in her native Canada. Recommended without reservation for all fiction collections. Edward Cone, New York Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.