Immigrant stories usually come in two parts, and are easy to summarize. Part one: she leaves. Part two: she finds. The verbs are dangling because any direct object will do. Anything she had, she left. Anything she has, she found: a bed, a family, memories, a baby, home. Anya Ulinich's four-part Petropolis is a troubled novel about filling in those blanks.

Being a quarter-black in Russia is pretty black, and — especially in the Siberian backwater — Sasha Goldberg feels the stigma. Since Sascha's half-black father escaped to America, her mother refuses even to acknowledge his existence, even though the lively, peevish, pudgy, and afro'd girl right in front of her clearly would benefit from the presence of a male figure, or even the memory of one. Instead, through a series of poorly calculated decisions made mostly to annoy her mother, Sasha ends up pregnant at 16. Soon after she has the baby, she leaves.

The rest of the story is about finding. First, a place to live: Phoenix as a mail-order bride, Chicago as the pet project of Zionists, and finally Park Slope as a house cleaner. Next, people to love: Jake, a wheelchair-bound law student with cerebral palsy, and Jonathan, an aspiring rock star. Along the way, she finds it easy to forget others, such her mother and her child back in Russia.

Ulinich's book owes a lot to Gary Shteyngart, another Russian émigré writer, whose blurb graces her dust jacket. Both writers have a keen and acerbic eye for the excesses and melancholic undertones of American culture. Whereas Shteyngart finds his muse in an obese, wannabe gangster from St. Petersburg, however, Ulinich finds hers in the peregrinations of a lost teenager, at home neither in her decaying Siberian town of Asbestos 2 nor in that equally absurd land of breast milk and honey, Park Slope. Like its protagonist, Petropolis balances tenderness and an immigrant's incredulity — it's an uneasy tale with a restive soul.

-Joshua David Stein