Editorial Content for Country of Red Azaleas

COUNTRY OF RED AZALEAS is a searing, powerful work of fiction. Dominica Radulescu’s slim novel provides a crucial perspective from the Bosnian War and ongoing conflicts in Eastern Europe. She anchors the war narrative with the relationship between Serbian-born Lara and Marija from Sarajevo. The dynamic between the young women evolves and grows over the years, as they each navigate the fallout from the sociopolitical climate, and it guides the novel beautifully.

Radulescu begins in an idyll. She establishes Lara and Marija’s intense relationship in their childhood Sarajevo, and links their love and intimacy to the beauty of their culture, the joys and connections they find in each other’s hometowns and families --- as well as their passion for justice and equality, spearheaded by Marija’s fervor. The fall from paradise is predictable, but Radulescu’s sharp writing renders it all the more tragic instead of stale. Lara moves to Washington, D.C. with an American man and immerses herself in approaching justice through academia, while Marija remains in her war-ravaged homeland. Lara falls in love, revels in love and begins a family only to find that the fairy tale didn’t quite fit into her reality. Some may call what happens next self-sabotage, but Radulescu handles Lara’s psyche beautifully, rendering even her ostensibly shameful choices believable, relatable and understandable.

"Radulescu’s imagery is evocative, but the real triumph here is her characters. These women feel wholly authentic.... A fierce and beautiful novel that is in many ways an immigrant story, a war story and a love story all at once, it is one of the most unique and well-crafted of its kind."

Years later, as Lara is struggling with pains of divorce, custody, infidelity, career failures and loneliness, she discovers the trauma that Marija was forced to endure throughout the war. Radulescu provides critical sensitivity to the specific atrocities that women face during wartime. For many civilian women in times of military conflict, mass rape, torment, trafficking and assault are not nebulous or theoretical concepts, but horrendous physical realities, even today. Radulescu does not shy away from this, nor does she glorify, invalidate or trivialize it. She addresses these experiences head on, as well as explore how victims cope and suffer, always from a place of deference and understanding. Lara struggles to understand these realizations and the sometimes surprising methods of healing that Marija experiences, and the reader traces her process closely and authentically. Ultimately, these two women complete each other’s lives. Their sufferings are not compared or contrasted, but exist in parallel, each helping the other survive, so that they may thrive together.

The one weak plot point for me was this fierce through line of biological motherhood as savior from pain and even trauma. It seemed almost prescriptive, with little flexibility to imagine a reality in which a child does not inspire total confidence, or a motherhood that does not feel innate or natural. The theme emerges somewhat towards the late middle of the book and doesn’t connect strongly to the parental family lives of either young woman, and Radulescu seems to expect her reader to simply take it on faith that biological maternity must necessarily be encompassing in both situations. I prefer the image of family that exists outside of this prescription, of the powerful love that exists between Lara and Marija, built on a lifetime of shared consciousness and flaws that balance each other.

Overall, the writing is fluid and immersive. Radulescu’s imagery is evocative, but the real triumph here is her characters. These women feel wholly authentic. Their choices and thought processes resonate with reality, and though they are very different people, both are complex and well-examined female characters. Even in a narrative that involves such trauma, I felt confident throughout that the agency and authority of the story rested with its women, that the perspective would never cheapen the violence, but instead explore what it means to live within its reality. A fierce and beautiful novel that is in many ways an immigrant story, a war story and a love story all at once, it is one of the most unique and well-crafted of its kind.