Alina Adams
Auteur van Murder on Ice
Over de Auteur
Alina Adams has worked as a figure skating researcher for ABC Sports, ESPN, and TNT's coverage of the 1998 Olympics. She was also a writer for NBC's "StarSkates" series and a Contributing Editor to "International Figure Skating Magazine." Adams is Creative Content Producer for As The World Turns toon meer and Guiding Light. (Bowker Author Biography) toon minder
Ontwarringsbericht:
(eng) aka Sivorinovsky, Alina
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Tagged
Algemene kennis
- Pseudoniemen en naamsvarianten
- Sivorinovsky, Alina
- Geboortedatum
- 1969
- Geslacht
- female
- Nationaliteit
- USA
- Geboorteplaats
- Odessa, Russia
- Woonplaatsen
- San Francisco, California, USA
- Beroepen
- television production
- Korte biografie
- Alina Sivorinovsky (Alina Adams) was born in Odessa, USSR and immigrated to the United States in 1977. She grew up in San Francisco, California.
Alina can thank her brother for her career as a mystery author! In 1988, college freshman Alina (Alina Adams) volunteered to drive her brother to the ice rink for his skating lessons. By 1997, two major things happend: her brother had become the US Open Novice Ice Dance Champion and US Junior Collegiate Dance Champion, and Alina had become hooked on skating.
Alina meshed her writing and televistion producing skills and her interest in the skating world. She has worked as an associate producer of skating shows and as a skating researcher (much like her protagonist in her mystery series) for ABC, ESPN, and TNT.
Alina Adams has worked as a figure skating researcher for ABC Sports, ESPN, and TNT�s coverage of the 1998 Olympics. She was also a writer/feature producer for NBC�s �StarSkates� series, and a Contributing Editor to �International Figure Skating Magazine.� Alina has written four novels and a non-fiction books, Inside Figure Skating. She is also the author of Sarah Hughes: Skating to the Stars. - Ontwarringsbericht
- aka Sivorinovsky, Alina
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The Nesting Dolls: A Novel door Alina Adams
The story of Daria who marries Edward Gordon in 1931; they end up in Siberia and the tragedies they suffered as a Soviet Jew under Stalin. It follows Daria's granddaughters Natasha and Zoe up through 2019 in NYC. Interesting how they listened to their elders even when they didn't want to. Good read!
Deze bespreking is geschreven voor LibraryThing Vroege Recensenten.I was interested in this one because of its focus on an obscure and almost unbelievable episode, the disastrous history of the ill-fated Jewish Autonomous Region of Birobidzhan.
The author has done her research, as demonstrated by the helpful postscript in which her references are cited. Though it still remains a bit vague how much personal connection she has with the history involved, there is no doubt an involvement of some kind, and she does not conceal her background in the Russian-Jewish immigrant community of California. There is an extensive period of history covered, from the 1930s up to the perestroika era, and all of this is competent, with many sidelights, no doubt from family memories, that illuminate the twisting pathways of double-talk, surveillance and persecution involved in navigating survival in the Soviet Union.
There were several warning signs, for me. The first was the cover blurb announcing that the writer is a "New York Times bestselling author". For me, sufficient in itself to persuade me to stay away. More alarming still was the "also by" list of her previous works, which includes such titles as "The Fictitious Marquis", "When a Man Loves a Woman", and "On Thin Ice: A Figure Skating Mystery". My hope was that this one, due to the subject matter and presumably the personal connection, was one the author would treat with the gravity it merited. I am not, might I add, a reader of romances, which is a considerable understatement. I avoid them like the plague. In principle, though, I am willing to admit that a romantic novel might be serious and well-written; which I was hoping might be the case here. It was not.
Well, maybe it is not so much a want of seriousness as of skill Much of the writing is, sadly, tepid, bland, awkward, stale and astonishingly tin-eared. Then again, I have so successfully avoided the bestseller lists that possibly I have not been prepared for just how bad bestseller-oriented writing can be. In a climactic emotional scene involving the major love interests, we get the following (p. 461): "He scootched his chair closer to Regina’s, peeled her hands away from her face". Altogether, the final pages are, to my taste, insufferably soppy and treacly. There is what I would generously interepret as, perhaps, an inside joke, or a tip of the novelist's hat to the market for her works, where we are told that "Lena [the leading character] was an avid reader of what Vadik deemed 'nonsense literature.' Sidney Sheldong [sic], Judith Krantz, Jacqueline Susann" (p 437). Indeed.
Oh my gosh, every threadbare cliché from trashy romances. "He allowed Regina to peel off his shirt and finally run her hands over every centimeter of glowing skin". (p. 249) Which happens not long after said glowing-skinned hero is described "raising Regina’s chin with his hand, forcing her to look at him in a way she hadn’t since that day when he’d smeared her face with balm, triggering previously unknown sensations in Regina" (p. 245).
The characters are big on learning, and being taught, immense Life Lessons. Our heroine, within a space of three pages (p. 287-289) is described as catapulting, barreling, zig-zaggging, and plopping into one of her numerous Major Decisions, a "mammoth of a decision", the outcome of which, we discover not much farther on, has been "driving her anxiety through the roof" (p. 298)
Or (a recurring whinge): " You don’t love me. If you loved me, you would do what I asked" (p. 382)
Well, it is easy to skewer this kind of thing. Unfortunately, the writing detracts from a work that does deal with an intense and dramatic period of history, during which a clash of ideologies and world views was being played out in major crises and brutal wars that involved untold numbers of deaths and tragedies. Timely, as well, for sure. Not long ago I read a news report in which Russian officials were, behind the scenes, referring to Putin's desperate mass of new, untrained conscripts as "ground meat". The echoes are here, in the bloody Russan campaign against the Nazis: "Unofficially, they called it 'the Rzhev meat grinder,' as a conveyor of bodies was fed into the maw of a forest swamp between Rzhev and Bely". (p. 264)
I was moved to follow some of the references to Birobidzhan, of which I confess to having been largely ignorant beforehand. Wikipedia was enlightening and led me to:
https://blogs.loc.gov/maps/2020/09/go-east-young-jew-go-east/
The author's references are also an excellent starting point. Who knew that the Jewish Autonomous Region is still there on the maps and still has a Yiddish column in its newspapers ? That you can find, to this day, in Google Maps, running through one of its town, on the Sino-Russian border, a main street with the name "Ulitsa Sholom-Aleykhema" ? Who knew that the Canadian-born (a Manitoba native) Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson was involved with the promotion of Jewish emigration to Birobidzhan ? In all, a fascinating if flawed work.… (meer)
The author has done her research, as demonstrated by the helpful postscript in which her references are cited. Though it still remains a bit vague how much personal connection she has with the history involved, there is no doubt an involvement of some kind, and she does not conceal her background in the Russian-Jewish immigrant community of California. There is an extensive period of history covered, from the 1930s up to the perestroika era, and all of this is competent, with many sidelights, no doubt from family memories, that illuminate the twisting pathways of double-talk, surveillance and persecution involved in navigating survival in the Soviet Union.
There were several warning signs, for me. The first was the cover blurb announcing that the writer is a "New York Times bestselling author". For me, sufficient in itself to persuade me to stay away. More alarming still was the "also by" list of her previous works, which includes such titles as "The Fictitious Marquis", "When a Man Loves a Woman", and "On Thin Ice: A Figure Skating Mystery". My hope was that this one, due to the subject matter and presumably the personal connection, was one the author would treat with the gravity it merited. I am not, might I add, a reader of romances, which is a considerable understatement. I avoid them like the plague. In principle, though, I am willing to admit that a romantic novel might be serious and well-written; which I was hoping might be the case here. It was not.
Well, maybe it is not so much a want of seriousness as of skill Much of the writing is, sadly, tepid, bland, awkward, stale and astonishingly tin-eared. Then again, I have so successfully avoided the bestseller lists that possibly I have not been prepared for just how bad bestseller-oriented writing can be. In a climactic emotional scene involving the major love interests, we get the following (p. 461): "He scootched his chair closer to Regina’s, peeled her hands away from her face". Altogether, the final pages are, to my taste, insufferably soppy and treacly. There is what I would generously interepret as, perhaps, an inside joke, or a tip of the novelist's hat to the market for her works, where we are told that "Lena [the leading character] was an avid reader of what Vadik deemed 'nonsense literature.' Sidney Sheldong [sic], Judith Krantz, Jacqueline Susann" (p 437). Indeed.
Oh my gosh, every threadbare cliché from trashy romances. "He allowed Regina to peel off his shirt and finally run her hands over every centimeter of glowing skin". (p. 249) Which happens not long after said glowing-skinned hero is described "raising Regina’s chin with his hand, forcing her to look at him in a way she hadn’t since that day when he’d smeared her face with balm, triggering previously unknown sensations in Regina" (p. 245).
The characters are big on learning, and being taught, immense Life Lessons. Our heroine, within a space of three pages (p. 287-289) is described as catapulting, barreling, zig-zaggging, and plopping into one of her numerous Major Decisions, a "mammoth of a decision", the outcome of which, we discover not much farther on, has been "driving her anxiety through the roof" (p. 298)
Or (a recurring whinge): " You don’t love me. If you loved me, you would do what I asked" (p. 382)
Well, it is easy to skewer this kind of thing. Unfortunately, the writing detracts from a work that does deal with an intense and dramatic period of history, during which a clash of ideologies and world views was being played out in major crises and brutal wars that involved untold numbers of deaths and tragedies. Timely, as well, for sure. Not long ago I read a news report in which Russian officials were, behind the scenes, referring to Putin's desperate mass of new, untrained conscripts as "ground meat". The echoes are here, in the bloody Russan campaign against the Nazis: "Unofficially, they called it 'the Rzhev meat grinder,' as a conveyor of bodies was fed into the maw of a forest swamp between Rzhev and Bely". (p. 264)
I was moved to follow some of the references to Birobidzhan, of which I confess to having been largely ignorant beforehand. Wikipedia was enlightening and led me to:
https://blogs.loc.gov/maps/2020/09/go-east-young-jew-go-east/
The author's references are also an excellent starting point. Who knew that the Jewish Autonomous Region is still there on the maps and still has a Yiddish column in its newspapers ? That you can find, to this day, in Google Maps, running through one of its town, on the Sino-Russian border, a main street with the name "Ulitsa Sholom-Aleykhema" ? Who knew that the Canadian-born (a Manitoba native) Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson was involved with the promotion of Jewish emigration to Birobidzhan ? In all, a fascinating if flawed work.… (meer)
Deze bespreking is geschreven voor LibraryThing Vroege Recensenten.A very interesting book about a Jewish woman, Regina, who moves from Moscow to the Jewish Autonomous Region and her adventures and trauma throughout the war. I had never heard of the JAR before, so this book definitely piqued my interest based on the description.
Regina is a strong willed character and often difficult to like. The first half of the book was incredibly slow, but the second half made up for it. The storyline in the 1980s was also quite interesting and kept my interest with it's characters and complicated situations they had to navigate.
Overall an enjoyable read that has me wanting to learn more about the JAR… (meer)
Deze bespreking is geschreven voor LibraryThing Vroege Recensenten.I wish I could have read this whole book. I think it would have been a great story. I had several issues with getting this book. It was an ebook and I had trouble receiving. Once I finally got the book to download and started reading the next thing it had expired. It was taking me longer to read, as I discovered that I do not really enjoy reading by ebook method. I guess I better stick to an actual book.
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