Red Scarf (Furnivall)

The Red Scarf
Kate Furnivall, 2008
Penguin Group USA
480 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780425221648

Summary
Davinsky Labor Camp, Siberia, 1933: Only two things in this wretched place keep Sofia from giving up hope: the prospect of freedom, and the stories told by her friend and fellow prisoner Anna, of a charmed childhood in Petrograd, and her fervent girlhood love for a passionate revolutionary named Vasily.

After a perilous escape, Sofia endures months of desolation and hardship. But, clinging to a promise she made to Anna, she subsists on the belief that someday she will track down Vasily. In a remote village, she's nursed back to health by a Gypsy family, and there she finds more than refuge-she also finds Mikhail Pashin, who, her heart tells her, is Vasily in disguise. He's everything she has ever wanted—but he belongs to Anna.

After coming this far, Sofia is tantalizingly close to freedom, family—even a future. All that stands in her way is the secret past that could endanger everything she has come to hold dear. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Raised—Penarth, Wales, UK
• Education—London University
• Currently—lives in Devon, England

Kate Furnivall was raised in Penarth, a small seaside town in Wales. Her mother, whose own childhood was spent in Russia, China and India, discovered at an early age that the world around us is so volatile, that the only things of true value are those inside your head and your heart. These values Kate explores in The Russian Concubine.

Kate went to London University where she studied English and from there she went into publishing, writing material for a series of books on the canals of Britain. Then into advertising where she met her future husband, Norman. She travelled widely, giving her an insight into how different cultures function which was to prove invaluable when writing The Russian Concubine.

By now Kate had two sons and so moved out of London to a 300-year old thatched cottage in the countryside where Norman became a full-time crime writer. He won the John Creasey Award in 1987, writing as Neville Steed. Kate and Norman now live by the sea in the beautiful county of Devon, only 5 minutes from the home of Agatha Christie!

It was when her mother died in 2000 that Kate decided to write a book inspired by her mother's story. The Russian Concubine contains fictional characters and events, but Kate made use of the extraordinary situation that was her mother's childhood experience — that of two White Russian refugees, a mother and daughter, stuck without money or papers in an International Settlement in China. (From the author's website.)

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Book Reviews
Sophia Morozova's relationship with fragile Anna Fedorina begins through a small act of kindness at a 1930s Siberian labor camp. As the two inmates struggle daily to survive, they increasingly rely on each other for hope and comfort; when Anna falls ill, Sophia escapes, intending to find Anna's lifelong love, Vasily, and rescue Anna. Beautiful and charismatic, Sophia quickly becomes a force to reckon with in the town of Tivil, where she hopes to find Vasily, and her connections with powerful gypsy Rafik, the handsome factory director Mikhail Pashin and the stern but unreadable Aleksei Fomenko become satisfying sources of danger and desire. Furnivall (The Russian Concubine) paints a stark picture of rampant scarcity, grim regimentation and blaring propaganda in pre-WWII Soviet Russia. In pushing the limits of Sophia and Anna's love and friendship, she nicely pits small lives against a monolithic state, paradoxically composed of watchful villages.
Publishers Weekly

Can a Russian Gypsy with mystical powers protect a wretched village from marauding soldiers and commissars? Does the daughter of a murdered priest succeed in springing her best friend from a Siberian labor camp? Will an innocent victim of the Gulag find her true love? Furnivall, whose previous novel, The Russian Concubine, was set in 1920s China, now moves to Siberia in 1933, when Stalin's agricultural collectivization policies sent millions to their deaths. Following the path of Dr. Zhivago and the more recent The People's Act of Love, this romantic confection can make a reader shiver with dread for the horrors visited on the two heroines imprisoned in a labor camp and quiver with anticipation for their happy endings. Furnivall shows she has the narrative skills to deliver a sweeping historical epic, but we get too much of a good thing with a too-convoluted plot and repetitive sufferings. Still, the novel arrives in time for great beach reading and will fit well into the popular fiction collections of most large public libraries.
Barbara Conaty - Library Journal

Beautifully detailed descriptions of the land and the compelling characters who move through a surprisingly upbeat plot make this one of the year’s best reads. —Jen Baker
Booklist

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Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Red Scarf:

1. Talk about the conditions of the labor camp and how they foreshadow the Nazi concentration camps 10 years later. What is the camp's purpose, and how realistic do you think the novel's descriptions are?

2. Sofia and Anna form a deep friendship in the camp. Do you think bonds of friendship become more intense under the harsh conditions of a labor camp?

3. Sofia escapes to find Vasily in hopes that he can rescue Anna. After hearing stories about him, has Sofia fallen in love with him before she has even met him? Talk about Sofia's belief that Mikahil is Vasily—and how her growing attraction to him strains or tests the bonds of loyalty to Anna.

4. Discuss the mystical side of the novel. Are the gypsy Rafik's powers believable? Do you think they enhance or detract from what is otherwise a realistic story line?

5. When the Soviets banned the practice of religion, villagers took their faith underground. Why would the regime find religion a threat to the political order? And why will people go to such dangerous lengths to uphold their beliefs?

6. What about the title? What thematic significance does Sofia's red scarf carry in the novel?

7. Do you find the characters believable? Does Furnivall develop them into rich, psychologically complex individuals? Or do you find them flat, stereotypical figures—pure good vs. pure evil? Or something in between?

8. Were you surprised by the novel's reversal of events, the twists and turns of the plot? Did you feel manipulated...or is that how real life sometimes unfolds?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them online or off with attribution. Thanks.)

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