Better in Wiashington than Moscow 
 Thinking that Elliott Holt was male, I was immediately impressed by how convincingly the book got into the mind of its female protagonist, Sarah Zuckerman; much later, I learned that the author is female. We begin in 1966 in Moscow, with her as a young woman, unnamed at first, but with a voice that immediately interests and intrigues. And the interest does not diminish when we move back to her childhood in Washington around 1980, when Sarah meets Jenny Jones, whose family have just moved into their upscale neighborhood. The story will jump around in time, showing Sarah alternately as fourth-grader and a college graduate. She makes a thoroughly sympathetic character at any age, as she handles an absconding father, an obsessive mother, and a best-friend-for-ever whose forever doesn't last. 
 In 1982, Sarah writes a letter to Soviet President Yuri Andropov as a plea for peace, and Jenny writes one of her own. Sarah does not hear back, but Andropov answers Jenny's letter, inviting her and her family to Mosow. As in the real case of Maine schoolgirl Samantha Smith, who wrote a similar letter in the same year, Jenny becomes a media celebrity, inevitably altering her relationship with Sarah. And like Samantha, Jenny is killed in a small plane crash a year or so later, leaving Sarah to mourn their lost friendship. 
 Shortly after graduating, Sarah is invited to Moscow by a young woman named Svetlana, who had been assigned as Jenny's peer escort twelve years before. Sarah accepts, and the last two-thirds of the book takes place in Moscow. There, unfortunately, the interest drops. Sarah, who stays with another expatriate and sees Svetlana only occasionally, spends much of her time recording a first-time visitor's impressions of Moscow: the Kremlin, the metro, the babushkas, the peculiarities of the language. It is a moderately good piece of travel writing, but it is nowhere near as personal as the first part had been. Eventually, Holt will pick up the plot threads of the opening, deliver a few surprises, and steer everything to an enigmatic yet satisfying conclusion. But that hundred pages of touristy filler in the middle breaks the momentum of the book, and it never fully recovers.