This book isn't about anorexia or bulimia or the occasional colon cleanse. Purge is a book of two voices that takes us through the tumultuous times of WWII, the communist occupation of eastern Europe and into the uncertainty of Soviet life in the 1990's. It does not take place in Russia but in the little known country of Estonia. Estonia is a country in the Baltic Region of Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by the Gulf of Finland, to the west by the Baltic Sea, to the south by Latvia (343 km), and to the east by the Russian Federation. But this story could have been placed in any country that had been occupied by the Germans and then the Soviets. I'm going to do an aside here. My husband and I visited Moscow a year ago and wanted to go to the National Museum of Military History. We wanted to hear the Russian's "take" on things. Our guide, Olga, informed us that when the Russians finally drove the Germans back across the Germans' eastern front that they, the Soviets, liberated the countries that the Germans had occupied. Ok then. We rolled our eyes. Just ask those "liberated" people how they liked it and you will see just how much in Purge. The two voices are that of Aliide, born in the 1920's, in Estonia in a small village. The second voice is that of Zara, born in Vladivostok, Russia, sometime in the late 1970's. The two voices meet in 1992 when Zara escapes from her brutal pimp, Pasha, who had lured her from Russia with promises of making great money but instead forces her into being a sex slave in Germany.
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