Moonlight in Odessa is reviewed in the New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/books/review/Fay-t.html

The San Francisco Chronicle choose the first line of Moonlight in Odessa as one of their ‘Grabbers’  -  a sentence that immediately draws readers into the story.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/09/11/RVL019K9GH.DTL

Moonlight in Odessa was reviewed in Bust magazine:
http://www.bust.com/books/Moonlight-in-Odessa-A-Novel.html

Moonlight in Odessa is featured in Publishers Weekly’s Fall Firsts, a selection of ten promising debuts.
http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6667371.html

Moonlight in Odessa was chosen as National Geographic Traveler’s September Book of the Month selection.
http://traveler.nationalgeographic.com/2009/09/trip-lit/george-text

Moonlight in Odessa received a strong review from BookPage:
http://www.bookpage.com/books-10012266-Moonlight+in+Odessa

Melanie Hoggan interviewed Janet Skeslien Charles for the Shelby Promoter:

In 1994, Janet Skeslien Charles left Shelby, Mont., for Odessa, Ukraine as a Soros Teaching Fellowship Recipient. She would spend the next two years in Ukraine teaching English and immersing herself in the Russian language.

Charles didn’t leave Shelby empty handed, rather, she was full to the brim with ideas and dreams. Live in France. Write. Speak Russian. Write. Speak French. Write.”

Read the whole article here:
http://www.goldentrianglenews.com/articles/2009/09/02/shelby_promoter/news/news1.txt

Jamie Kelly of the Missoulian writes about Montana native Janet Skeslien Charles.

The subject of Ukrainian “mail-order brides” may seem strange for a Shelby writer’s first novel, but Janet Skeslien Charles has some experience in the area.

Not from the bride’s end.

Charles, who graduated from the University of Montana with an English major and minors in French and Russian, was working in Ukraine as an English teacher when two of her friends married Western men through a dating service.”

Read the article here:
http://www.missoulian.com/entertainment/books-and-literature/article_5fb79560-a80b-11de-b162-001cc4c002e0.html

Poignant. Imaginative. Passionate. Original. These are words Library Journal reviewers use to describe first novels this season. Scroll down to the literary section to see their thoughts on Moonlight in Odessa.

http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6698263.html

Jenny Shank interviews Janet Skeslien Charles for New West.

NW: It seems like many recent novels set in the countries of the former Soviet Union are at least in part comic or satirical, such as your novel, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated, and Gary Shteyngart’s Absurdistan.  Do you think the setting lends itself to a comic tone?

JSC: You are kind to compare Moonlight in Odessa to Everything is Illuminated and Absurdistan. Humor can grow from sad soil. It seems to me that if the humorous and the tragic are balanced, both become stronger. It is a matter of shading. It was my hope that the darker elements could be brought to light with humor and that humor could intensify the more sinister elements of the book.

It is frustrating that as a female writer who has chosen humor as a vehicle to tell a dark story, my novel has been called “chick lit,” a term I appreciate as much as I appreciate “chick marine” or “chick surgeon.” I look at the back of books and at literary sites and see descriptions like “Chick Lit,” “Jewish Interest,” “African-American Studies,” and “Asian Voices.” By using such labels, we eliminate anything that is not produced by a white male as literature, which brings us right back to the 1800’s when books were written predominately by well-to-do white males.”

Read the interview here:
http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/an_interview_with_janet_skeslien_charles/C39/L39/

More magazines recommends Moonlight in Odessa.
http://www.more.com/2053/8080-21-fall-books-we-re-buzzing