Promising start to a novel in a setting remote to most American readers: Disappearing Earth

Julia Phillips's novel, Disappearing Earth (2019), which the NYT picked as one of the 10 best books of the year, gets off to a good start but I'll have to withhold judgment on the work as a whole until I'm closer to the conclusion (not 1/4 through - have read 4.5 chapters, but the later chapters seem to be much longer than the first). The novel consists of 12 chapters, each named by the month of their occurrence. The first chapter is about the abduction of two young girls, and in each of the succeeding chapters the characters provide us with insight or at least an update on the search for the girls and their captor (or worse). OK, that's a good way to hold together a dozen "linked stories," but I'm not sure yet whether that's enough to hold together a novel. Honestly, the work feels as if it were initially written as separate stories, each in the same setting (which I'll get to in a moment) - many were published in different form under different titles in various lit magazines; it feels as if the connective device was shoehorned into some of most of the stories: you could read some of them w/ the reference to the abduction excised, and they'd be fine. That said, each of the first five stories is good and quite straightforward, even conventional; some are better than good - notably the abduction story itself and one about a couple going through rough times who narrowly escape a bear attack while on a camping trip. Others are left hanging, without a strong conclusion or resolution. Much of the strength of and interest in this novel comes from its remote setting, the Kamchatka (had to look that up) peninsula in easternmost Russia. Phillips provides lots of information and social context about this locale - in particular, about the strains of transition from communism to capitalism and about ethnic tensions between Russians and members of the native tribes, gravitating toward the few cities on the peninsula. It's always good to learn about new places and cultures when reading literary fiction, but I have to wonder: How well would this novel read it it were set in, say, Alaska (a place with many of the same cultural issues)? On the other hand, how would this novel read were it written by a native Russian or resident of Kamchatka - or, especially, if it were translated from Russian or a native language? We'll see how Phillips navigates these shoals and if she's able to bring together the diverse elements of her plot.