OKSANA, BEHAVE!
“The voice is so, so sharp and so funny that I am just like tickled - tickled! - to be reading it.” —Emma Straub, Wall Street Journal
AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK:
“[The] Ukrainian American heroine of this sweet-bitter debut is a wisecracking fatalist who can be counted on to say the inappropriate thing, a tendency that becomes more pronounced as doomed crushes and family crises pile up on the road to adulthood.”—O: The Oprah Magazine
When Oksana and her family move from the Ukraine to Florida to begin a new American life, her physicist father delivers pizza at night to make ends meet, her cranky mother sits at home all day worrying, and her flamboyant grandmother relishes the attention she gets from men. All Oksana wants is to be as far away from her family as possible, to have friends, and to be normal—and though she constantly tries to do the right thing, she keeps getting in trouble.
As she grows up, she continues to misbehave, from somewhat accidentally maiming the school-bus bully, to stealing the much-coveted key to New York City’s Gramercy Park, to falling in love with a married man. After her grandmother moves back to Ukraine, Oksana longs for the motherland that looms large in her imagination but is a country she never really knew.
When she visits her grandmother in Yalta and learns about her romantic past, Oksana comes to a new understanding of how to live without causing harm to the people she loves. But will Oksana ever quite learn to behave?
Add Oksana, Behave! on Goodreads.
INTERVIEWS AND PRESS
Interviews:
Bookforum talks with Maria Kuznetsova, Bookforum
The Goodness of Being Bad, Chicago Review of Books
Maria Kuznetsova Thinks You Should Go Ahead and Be Weird, Electric Literature
Maria Kuznetsova Writers' Workshop grad's debut novel explores misbehaving with a dose of humor, The Cedar Rapids Gazette
Author’s comic novel tracks girl’s journey from Russia to Gainesville, The Palm Beach Post
Interview with Maria Kuznetsova, The Debutante Ball
Selected Press:
10 Fantastic New Books to Read in March, Oprah Magazine
8 Books to Read This March, InStyle
28 Buzzy Books to Read This Spring, PopSugar
The 10 Books You’ll Want to Read This Spring, The Wall Street Journal
Two Novels About Young Soviet Transplants in America, The New York Times
PRAISE FOR OKSANA, BEHAVE!
“Tragicomic and bittersweet… An immigrant's coming-of-age tale done with brio.” - Kirkus
“Kuznetsova’s standout debut offers a fresh and funny look into the life of a bold young immigrant woman….Using light humor, Kuznetsova tackles difficult themes in her sparky narrator’s life; the nuances of trauma and campus rape culture are particularly well handled. While a yearning and affection for her homeland underlie much of the novel, Oksana’s story is that of a young woman making her own place in a world both new and familiar. This accomplished and frank work is a new take on an immigrant girl’s complicated coming-of-age.” — Publisher’s Weekly
“Oksana is smart, funny, and unpredictable. She is irreverent, too, which adds to her immense charm as a character.” — Ploughshares
“ Kuznetsova has created a heroine for the ages in her sparkling, piercingly insightful debut.” —Booklist
“Kuznetsova authentically portrays the nuances of growing up with a Soviet Jewish family… Each character is complex and unforgettable… even in heavier moments, Kuznetsova makes us laugh using Oksana’s genuine and comically honest character as she paves her own path to self-discovery.” —Jewish Book Council
"I LOVE Russian-American coming-of-age stories, and this one is a doozy! Maria Kuznetsova writes like a dream!" —Gary Shteyngart
““An irresistible, irrepressible comic saga. I utterly loved every page." —Anthony Marra, author of The Tsar of Love and Techno
“A brilliant, funny and ultimately generous novel, ideally crowded with incidental and essential pleasures both. At once unsparing and gentle, unpredictable and reliably wise, Oksana, Behave!is as unsettlingly and profoundly companionable as family.” —Rivka Galchen, author of Little Labors
“Like Oksana herself, this story is fierce, funny, brilliant, and irresistible. Kuznetsova has managed a neat trick here: a coming-of-age novel written with the perfect combination of longing and irreverence and threaded through with wonderful surprises. I fell for Oksana hard and fast and I know you will, too.” —Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, author of the New York Times bestseller The Nest
“Maria Kuznetsova writes with great nuance and deep honesty about American girlhood, and her Oksana will win your heart and make you sit up and pay attention. This is a complex, beautifully rendered debut.”—Pam Houston, author of Deep Creek
“A glorious, risky, exuberant book that somehow manages to be about ill-advised sex and the inexorable weight of history. Maria Kuznetsova writes with a deceptive ease that sweetens the melancholy and deepens the humor. I loved every word.” —Jade Chang, author of The Wangs Vs. the World
“A remarkable novel, heartwarming and so hilarious that the poignancy and tenderness takes you by surprise, again and again. It was impossible not to root for Oksana, no matter how mischievous her adventure.” —Fatima Farheen Mirza, author of the New York Times bestseller A Place for Us
"An absolutely winning book by a genuinely new-feeling voice: Fiendishly funny, cheerfully disobedient, and perfect in its rendition of the adult-world absurdities a young person must endure on the way to becoming an adult of her own. By the end, you're a part of Oksana's exquisitely drawn, nutso family." —Boris Fishman, author of Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo
"Little devil, infinite imbecile, poor futureless child - all the names her displaced, loving family gives to her as she crashes and burns and wanders the wilderness of her inheritance - fit perfectly. In Oksana, Maria Kuznetsova has also created a character of great passion and depth – of tragedy, even, too – the very sort that populates the stories of Chekhov and Tolstoy, the poems of Anna Akhmatova and all the other Russian writers Oksana looks to for comfort and company and some sort of bearing in this absurd world. This novel is a stark, hilarious delight." —Paul Harding, Pulitzer-Prize winner of Tinkers
“This is a funny, mischievous, and indeed badly behaved novel about a young woman who just can't seem to do the right thing, much as she'd maybe like to. It is also warm, tender, and effortlessly intelligent, traveling with ease between the New Jersey suburbs and American college parties to the beaches of Yalta and dead ends of academia. It is, in short, a terrific debut.” —Keith Gessen, author of A Terrible Country