Winterland, Meadows, B+

                     "Anya Yurievna Pertova has been accepted to the Metallurgist School for Sport for artistic gymnastics." Thus, life in 1973 Siberia turns on a dime for 8 year old Anya. She succeeds in the Soviet sport system, but pays a steep price. She is sternly pushed by coaches because without her success, the coaches are left behind. She endures torn ligaments for which there are shots, but never rest. She is withdrawn from school, and is seldom home, causing her to hardly ever see her dad or the kindly grandmother type upstairs in her building. Shots and more shots delay puberty in the quest to compete with the Romanians. And there is success - an individual bronze and the team gold at the 1980 Olympics. But the terrors of the system are never far away.  The grandmotherly Vera had survived ten years in the camps and thinks often about the hell she lived through. Vera's father was shot, her husband failed to survive the Gulag and her son died of starvation. Anya's father, Yuri, a young Kosmonol, moved to the far north in Norilsk, worked in a copper mine and  was an invalid in his 50's. Her mother Elena, a dancer for the Bolshoi, became so disillusioned with life above the Arctic Circle that she meandered off into the taiga and was never seen again. This is a very good book.