Russian canary zheltukhin. For different voices

Prologue

“...No, you know, I didn’t immediately realize that she was not herself. Such a nice old lady... Or rather, not old, that it’s me! The years, of course, were visible: the face was wrinkled and all that. But her figure is in a light raincoat, cinched at the waist like a youth, and that gray hedgehog on the back of a teenage boy’s head... And her eyes: old people don’t have eyes like that. There is something turtle-like in the eyes of old people: slow blinking, dull corneas. And she had sharp black eyes, and they held you at gunpoint so demandingly and mockingly... I imagined Miss Marple like that as a child.

In short, she came in and said hello...

And she said hello, you know, in such a way that it was clear: she didn’t just come in to gawk and didn’t waste words. Well, Gena and I, as usual, can we help with anything, madam?

And she suddenly said to us in Russian: “You really can, boys. “I’m looking,” he says, “for a gift for my granddaughter.” She turned eighteen and entered the university, the department of archeology. He will deal with the Roman army and its war chariots. So, in honor of this event, I intend to give my Vladka an inexpensive, elegant piece of jewelry.”

Yes, I remember exactly: she said “Vladka”. You see, while we were choosing and sorting through pendants, earrings and bracelets together - and we liked the old lady so much, we wanted her to be satisfied - we had time to chat a lot. Or rather, the conversation turned in such a way that it was Gena and I telling her how we decided to open a business in Prague and about all the difficulties and problems with local laws.

Yes, it’s strange: now I understand how cleverly she conducted the conversation; Gena and I were like nightingales (a very, very warm-hearted lady), but about her, except for this granddaughter on a Roman chariot... no, I don’t remember anything else.

Well, in the end I chose a bracelet - a beautiful design, unusual: the garnets are small, but beautifully shaped, curved drops are woven into a double whimsical chain. A special, touching bracelet for a thin girl’s wrist. I advised! And we tried to pack it stylishly. We have VIP bags: cherry velvet with gold embossing on the neck, a pink wreath, and gilded laces. We keep them for especially expensive purchases. This one was not the most expensive, but Gena winked at me - do it...

Yes, I paid in cash. This was also surprising: usually such exquisite old ladies have exquisite gold cards. But we, in essence, do not care how the client pays. We are also not the first year in business, we understand something about people. A sense of smell is developed – what is and what is not worth asking a person.

In short, she said goodbye, and we were left with the feeling of a pleasant meeting and a successful day. There are such people with a light hand: they will come in, buy cheap earrings for fifty euros, and after that the moneybags will go down like that! So it is here: an hour and a half passed, and we managed to sell three euros worth of goods to an elderly Japanese couple, and after them three young German women bought a ring each - identical, can you imagine that?

The German girls just came out, the door opens, and...

No, first her silver hedgehog swam behind the display case.

We have a window, which is also a showcase – half the battle is luck.

We rented this room because of him. It’s not a cheap space, we could have saved it by half, but because of the window – as I saw it, I said: Gena, this is where we start. You can see for yourself: a huge window in the Art Nouveau style, an arch, stained glass windows in frequent bindings... Please note: the main color is scarlet, crimson, what kind of product do we have? We have garnet, a noble stone, warm, responsive to light. And I, when I saw this stained glass window and imagined the shelves under it - how our garnets would sparkle in rhyme with it, illuminated by light bulbs... What is the main thing in jewelry? A feast for the eyes. And he turned out to be right: people definitely stop in front of our window! If they don’t stop, they’ll slow down, saying they should come in. And they often stop by on the way back. And if a person comes in, and if this person is a woman...

So what am I talking about: we have a counter with a cash register, you see, turned out so that the display case in the window and those who pass outside the window are visible as on the stage. Well, that means her silver hedgehog swam by, and before I had time to think that the old lady was returning to her hotel, the door opened and she entered. No, I couldn’t confuse it in any way, what, can you really confuse something like that? It was the delusion of a recurring dream.

She greeted us as if she was seeing us for the first time, and from the doorway: “My granddaughter is eighteen years old, and she has also entered the university...” - in short, all this canoe with archeology, the Roman army and the Roman chariot... gives out as if nothing had happened .

We were speechless, to be honest. If there were even a hint of madness in her, then no: black eyes look friendly, lips in a half-smile... An absolutely normal, calm face. Well, Gena was the first to wake up, we must give him his due. Gena’s mother is a psychiatrist with extensive experience.

“Madam,” says Gena, “it seems to me that you should look into your purse, and a lot will become clear to you. It seems to me that you have already bought a gift for your granddaughter and it is in such an elegant cherry bag.”

“Is that so? – she answers in surprise. “Are you, young man, an illusionist?”

And he puts a handbag on the display window... damn, I have this one in front of my eyes vintage handbag: black, silk, with a clasp in the shape of a lion's face. And there is no bag in it, even if you crack it!

Well, what thoughts could we have? Yes, none. We've gone completely crazy. And literally a second later it thundered and blazed!

…Sorry? No, then this started happening - both on the street and around... And to the hotel - that’s where the car with this Iranian tourist exploded, huh? - the police and ambulance came in droves to hell. No, we didn’t even notice where our client went. She probably got scared and ran away... What? Oh yes! Gena gave me a hint, and thanks to him, I completely forgot, but it might come in handy for you. At the very beginning of our acquaintance, the old lady advised us to get a canary to revive the business. As you said? Yes, I was surprised myself: what does a canary have to do with a jewelry store? This is not some kind of caravanserai. And she says: “In the East, in many shops they hang a cage with a canary. And to make her sing more cheerfully, they remove her eyes with the tip of a hot wire.”

Wow - a remark from a sophisticated lady? I even closed my eyes: I imagined the suffering of the poor bird! And our “Miss Marple” laughed so easily..."

The young man, who was telling this strange story to an elderly gentleman who had entered their store about ten minutes ago, stood near the windows and suddenly unfolded a very serious official ID, which was impossible to ignore, fell silent for a minute, shrugged his shoulders and looked out the window. There, the flounces of tiled skirts on the Prague roofs glittered like a carmine cascade in the rain, a sideways, squat house stared out onto the street with two blue attic windows, and above it stretched the powerful crown of an old chestnut tree, blooming in many creamy pyramids, so that it seemed as if the whole tree was strewn with ice cream from the nearest cart.

Further on stretched the park on Kampa - and the proximity of the river, the whistles of steamboats, the smell of grass growing between the paving stones, as well as friendly dogs of various sizes, let off their leashes by their owners, imparted to the entire area that lazy, truly Prague charm...

...which the old lady valued so much: this detached calm, and the spring rain, and the blooming chestnuts on the Vltava.

Fear was not part of her emotional range.

When at the door of the hotel (which she had been watching for the last ten minutes from the window of such a conveniently located jewelry store) an inconspicuous Renault jerked and puffed fire, the old lady simply slipped out, turned into the nearest alley, leaving behind her a numb square, and at a walking pace, past the police cars and ambulances that, screaming, were rushing towards the hotel through a dense traffic jam on the road, walked five blocks and entered the lobby of a more than modest three-star hotel, where a room had already been reserved in the name of Ariadna Arnoldovna von (!) Schneller.

In the shabby lobby of this boarding house rather than a hotel, they nevertheless tried to introduce guests to the cultural life of Prague: on the wall near the elevator hung a glossy poster for a concert: a certain Leon Etinger, contratenor(white-toothed smile, cherry butterfly), performed today with the philharmonic orchestra several numbers from the opera “La clemenza di Scipione” by Johann Christian Bach (1735–1782). Place: St. Nicholas Cathedral in Mala Strana. The concert starts at 20.00.

Having filled out the card in detail, and with special care writing down the middle name that no one here needed, the old lady received from the receptionist a good-quality key with a copper keychain on a chain and went up to the third floor.

Her room at number 312 was located very conveniently - just opposite the elevator. But, finding herself in front of the door to her room, for some reason Ariadna Arnoldovna did not unlock it, but, turning left and reaching room 303 (where a certain Demetros Papakonstantinou, a smiling businessman from Cyprus, had been living for two days), took out a completely different key and, Having easily turned it in the lock, she entered and closed the door with a chain. Throwing off her cloak, she retired to the bathroom, where every item seemed to be very familiar to her, and, first of all, wetting a terry towel with hot water, she ran it forcefully along the right side of her face, pulling off a flabby bag under her eye and a whole scattering of small and large wrinkles . The large oval mirror above the washbasin revealed a mad harlequin with the mournful half of an old woman's mask.

Then, prying a transparent adhesive strip above her forehead with her fingernail, the old lady pulled the gray scalp off her completely bare skull - a remarkable shape, by the way - and at once transformed into an Egyptian priest from an amateur production by students of an Odessa gymnasium.

The left side of the wrinkled face slid down, like the right, under the pressure of hot water, as a result of which it was discovered that Ariadna Arnoldovna von (!) Schneller would do well to shave.

“It’s not bad... this hedgehog, and the crazy old woman. Good joke, the young lady would have liked it. And fagots are funny. There’s still a lot of time until eight, but let’s sing…” I thought...

...thought, studying himself in the mirror, a young man of the most indeterminate age - due to his slight build -: nineteen? twenty seven? thirty five? Young men as lithe as eels usually performed female roles in medieval traveling troupes. Perhaps that is why he was often invited to sing female parts in opera productions; he was extremely natural in them. In general, music critics certainly noted in their reviews his plasticity and artistry - rather rare qualities in opera singers.

And he thought in an unimaginable mixture of languages, but mentally pronounced the words “hokhma”, “hedgehog” and “young lady” in Russian.

In this language he spoke with his eccentric, brainless and very beloved mother. It was her name that was Vladka.

However, this is a whole story...

Trapper

1

...And the family didn’t call him anything else. And because for many years he supplied animals to the Tashkent and Alma-Ata zoos, and because this nickname suited his whole wiry, hunting appearance.

On his chest there was a trace of a camel's hoof imprinted with baked gingerbread, his whole back was striped by the claws of a snow leopard, and the number of times he was bitten by snakes was almost uncountable... But he remained a powerful and healthy man even at seventy, when unexpectedly for his family suddenly he decided to die, for which he left home the way animals go to die - alone.

Eight-year-old Ilyusha remembered this scene, and subsequently, cleared by memory of the confusion of exclamations and confusion of gestures, it acquired the laconicism of a quickly completed picture: The trapper simply changed his slippers for shoes and went to the door. The grandmother rushed after him, leaned her back against the door and shouted: “Over my corpse!” He pushed it aside and left silently.

And one more thing: when he died (he starved himself to death), his grandmother told everyone how light his head was after death, adding: “This is because he himself wanted to die - and he died and did not suffer.”

Ilyusha was afraid of this detail all his life.

* * *

Actually, his name was Nikolai Konstantinovich Kablukov, and he was born in 1896 in Kharkov. Grandmother’s brothers and sisters (almost ten people, and Nikolai was the eldest, and she, Zinaida, was the youngest, so they were separated by about nineteen years, but mentally and by fate he remained with her all his life nearest) – all were born in different cities. It’s hard to understand, and now you can’t ask anyone, what insatiable wind drove their dad across the Russian Empire? But it drove me, both in the tail and in the mane. And if we’re talking about the tail and the mane: only after the collapse of the Soviet state did my grandmother dare to reveal a piece of the “terrible” family secret: my great-grandfather, it turns out, had his own stud farm, and it was in Kharkov. “How the horses came to him! - she said. “They just raised their heads and walked.”

At these words, each time she raised her head and - tall, stately even in old age, took a wide step, smoothly moving her hand; in this movement of hers there seemed to be a bit of horse grace.

– Now it’s clear where Trapper’s passion for hippodromes comes from! – Ilya once exclaimed to this. But the grandmother looked with her famous “Ivano-threatening” gaze, and he shut up so as not to upset the old woman: there she was, the keeper of family honor.

It is quite possible that his great-grandfather’s cart jolted through the cities and villages, racing with the inexorable rush of vagabond blood: his most distant known ancestor was a gypsy with the triple surname Prokhorov-Maryin-Seregin - apparently, double was not enough for him. And Kablukov... God knows where it came from, this surname is no wonder (it’s also disgraced because one of the two Alma-Ata psychiatric hospitals, the one on the street of the same name, gave this surname a common noun laugh: “Are you from Kablukov?” ).

Perhaps the same ancestor hewed and hewed to the guitar so that the heels of his heels flew off?

In the family, in any case, there were scraps of little-known and simply indecent songs, and everyone, young and old, hummed them, with a characteristic strain, without going too deeply into the meaning:

Gypsy to Gypsy says:
“I’ve had it for a long time...
Eh, yay - there’s a bottle on the table!
Let's have a drink, honey!

There was something more decent, although on the same table theme:

Sta-a-kan-chi-ki gra-ane-ny-iya
Fell off the table...

The Trapper himself liked to sing this under his breath when he cleaned the canary cages:

Fell and crashed -
My life was shattered...

Canaries were his passion.

Cages were piled from floor to ceiling at the four corners of the dining room.

A friend of his worked at the zoo, he was an amazing master. Each cell is a small openwork house, and each one is different: one is like a carved box, the other is exactly a Chinese pagoda, the third is a cathedral with twisted turrets. And inside there is all the furniture, a careful, painstaking management for the singing residents: a “bathing room” - a goal, like a football goal, with a bottom made of plexiglass, and a drinking bowl - a complex thing, into which water came from a reservoir; it had to be changed every morning.

But the main thing is the feeder: a wooden box into which millet and millet were poured. The food was stored in a chintz bag, tied at the neck with silver braid from a New Year's gift from Ilyusha's early childhood. The bag is green, with orange flowers, and a scoop is tied to it, too - baby babble... ...nonsense, why do I remember this?

And I clearly, very clearly remember the browed, nosed face of the Trapper, shaded by the thin bars of the birdcage. Deep-set black eyes with an expression of demanding admiration and in each - the yellow light of a galloping canary.

And a skull cap! He wore them all his life: tetrahedral Chust “duppies” - solid boxes with kalampir peppers quilted with white thread, Samarkand “piltaduzi”, Bukhara gold-embroidered ones... A variety of skullcaps, lovingly embroidered by a woman’s hand. There were always a lot of women hovering around him.

He spoke fluent Uzbek and Kazakh; if you started cooking pilaf, you couldn’t breathe from the child, and the carrots stuck to the ceiling, but it turned out delicious.

He drank tea only from a samovar and at least seven enamel mugs per evening - he did not recognize cups. If he was in a good mood, he joked a lot, laughed loudly and loudly, with funny sobs and a canary fistula on high notes; He was always spouting off some unknown jokes: “The village of Yushta! This is the wilderness!” - and at every opportunity, like a magician, he extracted from memory a suitable fragment of a poem, inventively changing the rhyme along the way, if suddenly the word was forgotten or did not make sense.

Ilyusha climbed the Trapper like a tree.

Much later, having learned something more about him, Ilya recalled individual gestures, glances and words, belatedly endowing his personality with passions that were not trampled, smoldering even in later years.

In general, there was a time when he thought a lot about the Trapper, unearthing some memories confused by his simple-minded childhood memory. For example, how he wove baskets for canary nests from kebab sticks.

Together they collected the sticks in the grass near the neighboring kebab shop, then washed them for a long time under the pump in the yard, scraping off the hardened wax of old fat. After which the giant fingers of the Trapper began an intricate dance, weaving deep baskets.

– Are nests really like a box? - asked Ilyusha, carefully watching his dexterous thumb, which effortlessly bent the aluminum spear and easily threaded it under the already woven frame.

“Otherwise the testicles will fall out,” the Trapper explained seriously; He always explained in detail what he was doing, how and why.

Pieces of camel wool were wound onto the finished frame (“so that the kids wouldn’t freeze”) - and if there was no wool, yellow, lumpy batting was picked out from an old, wartime quilted jacket. Well, strips of colored fabric were knitted on top of everything - here the grandmother, with a generous hand, took out scraps from her treasured tailor's bundle. And the nests came out festive - calico, satin, silk - very colorful. And then, said the Trapper, the birds care. And the birds “created comfort”: they lined their nests with feathers, pieces of paper, looked for balls of grandmother’s “gypsy” hair, combed out in the morning and accidentally rolled under a chair...

“The poetry of family life...” sighed the Trapper with emotion.

The testicles turned out very cute, bluish-pockmarked; they could be examined only if the female got out of the nest, but it was forbidden to touch them. But the chicks hatched scary, similar to Kashchei the Immortal: bluish, bald, with huge beaks and watery bulging eyes. Soon they were covered with fluff, but they remained scary for a long time: newborn dragons. Sometimes they fell out of the nests: “This inexperienced female, you see, drops them herself,” - and sometimes one of them died, and Ilyusha, noticing the stiff corpse on the floor of the cage, turned away and closed his eyes so as not to see the whitish film on his rolling eyes.

But he was allowed to feed the grown chicks. The trapper kneaded the egg yolk, mixed it with a drop of water, picked up the pulp with a match and with a precise movement pushed it straight into the chick's gaping beak. For some reason, all the chicks strove to bathe in the drinking bowls, and the Trapper explained to Ilyusha how they should be taught, where to drink from, and where to swim. He loved to rock in his palms; showed how to take it so that, God forbid, you don’t hurt the bird.

But all these nursery worries paled before the magical morning moment, when the Trapper - already awake, cheerful, early trumpet (he blew his nose into a large checkered handkerchief so that the grandmother covered her ears and always exclaimed the same thing: “The trumpet of Jericho!” - for which she immediately received in response: “Valaam’s donkey!”) - he released all the canaries from their cages to fly. And the air became jungle: dense, iridescent, yellow-green, fan-shaped... and a little dangerous; and the Trapper stood in the middle of the room - tall, like the Colossus of Rhodes (it’s grandma again) - and in a gentle, coarsening bass with a sudden fistula squeak, he talked with the birds: he clicked his tongue, clicked, did such things with his lips that Ilyusha laughed like crazy.

And there was another morning number: The trapper funny fed the birds from his mouth: he filled his mouth with water, began to “walk and gurgle” in order to attract them. And they flew to his lips and drank, throwing their heads back like infants. So in the spring, birds flock to a mighty tree with a birdhouse nailed high. And he himself, with his head thrown back, looked like a giant chick of some pterodactyl.

Grandma didn’t like this, she got angry and repeated that birds are carriers of dangerous diseases. And he just laughed.

All the birds were singing.

Ilyusha distinguished them by their voices, loved to watch how the canary’s neck trembled during especially loud trills. Sometimes the Trapper allowed me to put my finger on the singing throat - to listen to the pulsating placer with my finger. And he taught them to sing himself. He had two methods: his own loud singing of Russian romances (the birds picked up the melody and sang along) - and records with the voices of birds. There were four records: slate-black, with a dagger-like light running in a circle, with pink and yellow cores, where in small letters it was indicated which birds were singing: tits, warblers, blackbirds.

– What does a noble singer’s valuable song consist of? - asked the Trapper. He paused for a moment, then carefully placed the record on the turntable and carefully let the needle spin in its enchanted circle. From the distant silence of the blue hills, bird voices were born and floated in ringing streams, chattering over pebbles, striking out, calling out, and scattering silvery sounds in the air.

Ilyusha knew all the songs of the Russian canary; already knew how to distinguish “light oatmeal” from “mountain”, “rising” - when, starting to sing in a low register, gradually, as if climbing a mountain, the singer pulls the song upward, into transcendental trills with a fading sweetness of sound (and you are afraid that he will not cut off Li) and holds the reverent “i-i-i-i” for a long time, translating it either to “yu-yu-yu-yu”, then to “oo-oo-oo-oo”, and after a short sigh he exhales full and round sound (“Knorru let it go!” the Trapper remarked in a whisper) – and ends with low, gently questioning whistles.

Today I will write about Dina Rubina, about my beloved Dina Rubina, or rather, about her latest novel “Russian Canary”, published in 2014. The novel "Russian Canary" is great. It took me a long time to get ready to read it, because the work is large-scale: three full volumes. I wanted to start reading, and nothing would tear me away from this merging with the book. I took it with me on vacation and was terribly worried when my e-book started to die, that I wouldn’t be able to finish reading it. I turned down the font as much as possible, but finished reading it.

I don’t see any point in writing about each book of this trilogy separately, since they are a single whole.

Book 1 – “Russian Canary. Zheltukhin."

Book 3 – “Russian Canary. Prodigal son".

This trilogy is a family saga about the lives of two families, completely different in everything, living far from each other, but whose destinies in some years slightly touch, and in the end are surprisingly intertwined.

The first volume is the history of these families. The life of several generations spanning the entire twentieth century floats before us, catching even past centuries with its wing: their ups and downs, joys and tragedies. We get acquainted with many destinies, many characters, good and bad, but as always with Rubina, they are original, brightly drawn, interesting. Oh, how I love it! The first volume reminded me very much in its style of Rubina’s book “On the Sunny Side of the Street”: just as warm, colorful and multi-faceted.

The first family is Kazakh, quiet, reserved, living in the suburbs of Almaty, in which the passion for breeding canaries arose and was passed on from generation to generation. In that canary tribe there was an amazing singer named Zheltukhin. A virtuoso singer who performed such mind-blowing roulades and whistled the most human songs. Moreover, the singer is hereditary: all the Zheltukhins were famous for their talent.

And there was also an Odessa Jewish family named Etinger, which included such an explosive mixture of characters, passions, stories, talents! Only once did the lines of these two families come into contact: fate brought into this family one of the representatives of the Zheltukhtny family.

Why so much attention to canaries? Yes, because it is the home song of the Zheltukhin family that will become fateful for the main characters.

And there is very little about the main characters in the first part of “Russian Canary”. The stories of two families with their secrets, passions, seething, seething - this is only fertile ground for the appearance of the main characters, who are discussed in the next two volumes. The entire first volume is a kind of epilogue.

And the main characters are the last of the Etinger family, Leon, and the last representative of the Kazakh family, the deaf girl Aya. Young, creative. She is a gifted photographer. He is a talented musician, owner of a unique voice, for which he received the name “Kenar Rusi” (“Russian Canary”). Yes, yes, the canary again. I won’t tire of repeating that Dina Rubina loves to write about talented people, she simply savors these talents! She likes people who are passionate in everything: in life, love, profession. And it gives me great pleasure to read about such people.

These two are meeting where do you think? In Thailand. Well, where else can they meet? And the next two books of the trilogy are already about them.

The last two volumes of the Russian Canary trilogy are already stepping beyond the boundaries of the usual family saga. Here Rubina is completely different. It draws us into the adventure genre and is more reminiscent in style of The White Dove of Cordoba.

It would seem, what kind of adventures can a musician and a photographer have? Perhaps yes. If only vocals were Leon's only occupation in life, and Aya did not have the gift of getting into stories thanks to her unbridled, freedom-loving character and feeling of being a man of the world.

If the first book of the trilogy is more everyday, then the second book “Russian Canary. Voice" and the third book "Russian Canary. The Prodigal Son" are written in the spirit of a good adventure novel. There is more exciting fiction here.

But in all three books, what I love Rubina for is the liveliness of images and characters (and you’re always surprised at how skillfully she interweaves them together). Full of secondary images, but so alive and real!

And also the humanity of relationships, respect for family ties, the beauty of descriptions of nature and geographical places.

The book that broke all sales records in 2014! The first book of Dina Rubina’s colorful, stormy and multifaceted family saga “Russian Canary”, brilliantly performed by the author. The release of each new book by Dina Rubina is an event that attracts the attention of millions of readers. The Russian Canary trilogy is a family saga, a detective story, and a love-psychological drama. An ebullient, inescapably musical Odessa family and an Almaty family of secretive, silent wanderers... For a century, they have been connected only by a thin thread of the avian family - the brilliant maestro canary Zheltukhin and his descendants. At the end of the 20th century, a chaotic history is settled with bitter and sweet memories, and new people are born, including “the last in time, Etinger,” who is destined for an amazing, and at times suspicious, fate... “Zheltukhin” is the first book in Dina Rubina’s “Russian” trilogy. canary". Recorded by the Vimbo production center Performer: Dina Rubina Illustration: Yulia Stotskaya Producers: Vadim Bukh, Mikhail Litvakov © Dina Rubina ©&? Vimbo LLC, Moscow, Russia, 2014

On our website you can download the book "Russian Canary. Zheltukhin" Rubina Dina Ilyinichna for free and without registration in fb2, rtf, epub, pdf, txt format, read the book online or buy the book in the online store.

The first book of what I hope is a very good trilogy!
While looking for new interesting books (I wanted something a little detective, but just a little) I came across this book.
The fact that it was written by a female author did not bother me, because... If the author writes really well (preferably in the third person), then I don’t think that there is any need to make something for men and women. Therefore, I enjoyed reading such authors as Ursula Le Guin, Maria Semyonova and Andre Norton. Now Dina Rubina will most likely be among them - I’ll read a couple more of her books. As one writer said in an interview:
“... I enjoyed reading some books written by women...”, “... Therefore, if the author is unverified, I look not at the gender, but at the first “two pages”. It is quite enough to evaluate the style, literacy, and form of presentation of the material and make a decision: to read or not to read..." (Artyom Kamenisty).
Guided by similar ideas, I “flipped through” an excerpt of the book available on the Internet. Realizing that the writing was good, I bought this book.

Now about the book itself.
As I said earlier, the writing style is excellent, I liked it more and more as I read it. Very easy and interesting to read! Further in the book there are intrigues, spies, secrets - in general, everything I love :-) I hope there will be even more of them in the next book of the trilogy! It is especially worth noting the musical line in the work. She is depicted in a hateful manner, but at the same time very bright. A huge number of storylines can, of course, be alarming at the beginning, but they do not develop very quickly and therefore gradually a complete picture of what is happening on the entire scale of the action emerges. Quite a lot has been written about each character, so the author managed to reveal the characters perfectly. The descriptions are also very beautiful and voluminous, as if this very city and place is in front of you. So realistic and beautiful that you want to visit there, for example, in Odessa. A similar impression on me was made by Robert Asprin’s work “Games of Dragons”, where she wrote about the city he loved with incredible love for descriptions of the surrounding places. But New Orleans was there (even before the events that happened to it), and in this work the places are somehow closer, more familiar. And it seems that Odessa is as close as, say, Alma-Ata, no matter how far they are, no matter how different they may seem, but there is something so... familiar about them, or what?
What was a little surprising was the unusual description of the main character, which we learn about as if from others, and he himself appears briefly, fleetingly. It turned out very unique and interesting!

(About the plot: for those who haven’t read it, it’s better to skip this paragraph)
Several families, different cities, customs, morals and traditions. Complete strangers and their families are united only by the canary and its descendants. A small songbird Zheltukhin, which creates that musical atmosphere! Yes, yes, it is she, and not the musical Odessa family or the young man with a contrasoprano voice, who creates to the greatest extent a certain musical rhythm of the work. It is in honor of this bird that the book is named, the continuation of which, I hope, will be soon!

I will definitely read the sequel in the form of two books! Excellent, I think there will be a trilogy... I hope that the sequel will not let you down and will be just as interesting!
After reading it, I couldn’t resist looking up the history of the book on the Internet. It turns out that the author very carefully studies what he writes about - a rather rare phenomenon in modern literature. She is interested in those events, phenomena and everything possible that she tells the reader about. This was mentioned on one site, sort of like an interview with a writer - I hope it’s true.