If you mix all the shades of the visible part of the color spectrum, you get white. The color of snow. The color of a Polaroid frame. The color of a flag that gets thrown away when you give up, because you no longer have the strength to endure pain or love, and you no longer have the strength to hope. High school student Zhenya associates the color white with the most precious moments of her life—when her mothers were together, and before betrayal came into their shared home; when, on snow-white sheets of paper, she wrote new and new letters to the musician Lena, whose feelings seized her whole being. Human closeness, human happiness—can anything be more fragile? Even the first snow seems to lie on the ground longer.
Xenia Burzhskaya’s book has a magical quality: after reading it, you start to feel, even through your skin, the cool streams of happiness—and how, day by day, they melt away irretrievably in everyday hustle. Yes, nothing can be returned or held onto, but you can press the button of your inner Polaroid in time.
This is a love novel where everyone loves everyone: a girl loves a boy, a woman loves a woman, a daughter loves her mothers… (Tatyana Tolstaya)
A tender nostalgic love story in all its manifestations (Dina Klyucharyova, Wonderzine)
“Xenia Burzhskaya has a refined and audacious pen. She wields it like a top-class fencer wields a rapier. Her words-stabs are always precise, instant, and right on target. She doesn’t spare the reader—just as she doesn’t spare her heroes. The novel ‘My White’ is a secret wound that, in fact, will never heal, will never close. Of course, the problems Burzhskaya writes about require the utmost care and delicacy—and she manages that: to be both delicate and audacious, fearless and bashful, to wound with her ironic observation and at once rush to save with her tenderness and gentle care.” (Sergey Nikolaevich, editor-in-chief of the magazine “Snob”)