If you go to Italy to eat, India to pray, and Indonesia to love, what do you go to Russia for? Guess we’ll never know. Author Elizabeth Gilbert, known for writing Eat, Pray, Love and the magazine story that inspired the film Coyote Ugly, is pulling her upcoming Siberia-set novel, The Snow Forest, from release. It was due to come out in February 2024 from Penguin Random House, but Gilbert has decided not to release it after the reported outcry from Ukrainian readers over the book’s Russian setting. The novel tells “the story of a group of individuals who made a decision to remove themselves from society to resist the Soviet government and to try to defend nature against industrialization,†according to Gilbert. “I have received an enormous, massive outpouring of reactions and responses from my Ukrainian readers expressing anger, sorrow, disappointment, and pain about the fact that I would choose to release a book into the world right now,†Gilbert said in a statement on June 12. “I want to say that I have heard these messages and read these messages, and I respect them. As a result, I’m making a course correction, and I’m removing the book from its publication schedule. It is not the time for this book to be published. And I do not want to add any harm to a group of people who have already experienced and who are all continuing to experience grievous and extreme harm.â€