SOURCE: See, Carolyn. “Breathless.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (9 August 1998): 9.

In the following review, See contends Once upon the River Love is flawed due to its tired cliches regarding the political situation in Siberia and a glut of passages focusing on movie star Jean-Paul Belmondo.

When Andrei Makine's Dreams of My Russian Summers was published in America last year, it met with well-deserved acclaim. In these pages, Thomas McGonigle called it “one of the great autobiographical novels of this century.” Now, in 1998, we have Makine's Once upon the River Love, but its European copyright, 1996, is a year earlier than Russian Summers, [Dreams of My Russian Summers] and in many ways it reads like a rough draft of that “great autobiographical novel.”

Russian Summers concerned a sensitive young Russian boy who spends his summers in an obscure village at the edge of the Steppes—along with his sister—in...