However, the book exerts its most powerful emotional pull in its examination of Miri’s struggle to understand her feelings for both Yuri and Sasha. She builds multi-layered backstories for each of her three main characters, so that the reader understands their actions and motivations. The author skillfully moves the plot along, focusing on the narrative tension of the dangers the characters face. The story then switches back and forth between the harrowing experiences of both groups of travelers. Miri joins up with a wounded soldier named Sasha whose life she has saved and slips away in one direction, while Vanya and Yuri head off in another. Since Vanya has been promised that if his equations prove Einstein’s theory he and his family will be allowed to emigrate to America, he is doubly determined to escape. The author places the fictional Vanya in the race to prove Einstein’s Theory of Relativity in actuality, Einstein did make use of the work of several mathematical and scientific thinkers, such as Henri Poincaré, in his final proof. To complicate matters, a powerful Russian administrator at the university where Miri’s brother Vanya works is attempting to undermine him. Miri Abramov, a newly-trained surgeon at a time when women were viewed as less capable than their male counterparts, is engaged to marry her mentor, Yuri, but her family is suddenly forced to flee because of the Czar’s order to conscript all Jewish men in the town.

A work of historical fiction that explores the tangled relationships between the various protagonists, it also touches upon the difficulties women physicians in Russia faced as pioneers in their field the harsh reality of daily life for Jews in Russia before World War I and the difficulty in proving Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Rachel Barenbaum’s absorbing debut novel A Bend in the Stars has something for every reader.

A Bend in the Stars by Rachel Barenbaum