Adrienne Celt’s Invitation to a Bonfire is a literary novel in the vein of Russian classics wrapped around a murder mystery thriller. Presented as an archival collection, the epistolary structure of the tale is layered and nuanced as the “documents” create both a sense of breathless anticipation for what we know will come after reading the beginning and a dark, intriguing commentary on each of the three central characters.

The main focus of the story is young Zoya Andropov, an orphan who is smuggled out of post-Revolution Russia and deposited in the cruel world of a wealthy all-girls boarding school in New Jersey. Zoya’s diary provides the bulk of the narrative and gives the literary thriller a coming of age feel. She is startlingly observant and starved for connection, her isolation and admiration for the author and fellow Russian émigré’s work setting her on a collision course with the Orlovs. Cultured, brilliant, passionate, and drawn to two compelling women, Leo Orlov is immensely talented and utterly controlled by his wife. Vera Orlov is magnetic, cold, calculating, and elegant, at once Lev’s loadstone and the source of his resentment. What unfolds at their meeting is an inevitable love triangle bound to end as shockingly and tragically as any of the great Russian classics.

My issues with the story lie in the drawn out depictions of Zoya’s bleak youth and the anachronisms of the era. The page time devoted to Zoya’s childhood built the foundation of her personality and psyche, and while I appreciate the exploration of character development in a psychological thriller, it reached a point where the descriptions of her youth became boring and tedious to read. And though this novel is set in the 1920s, I found the details of daily life more on par with a setting in the 50s or later. In historical novels, I always admire an author’s ability to transport me to the era, but many of the details in this story seemed too modern for the 20s, jarring me from the narrative.

That said, I was captivated by the author’s stunning use of language. Celt’s writing was deeply poetic, stark and bleak, as seductive as the ill-fated story of dangerous passion. The synopsis of the story claims that the tale is loosely based on the Nabokov marriage. I think the author took great creative license in that regard, but her writing is reminiscent of Nabokov’s in its breathtaking lyricism and vivid, evocative language.

Invitation to a Bonfire is a dark story of passion, loneliness, and deception, of class, identity, and nationality. Populated by unhealthy and unreliable characters, the tale is an exploration of the fine line between infatuation and obsession, and it is as mesmerizing as it is disturbing.

Recommended to fans of Nabokov’s writing, literary fiction, and psychological thrillers with a love triangle at the heart of the mystery.