A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian
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Average rating3.4
Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamourous blonde Ukrainian divorcee. He was eighty-four and she was thirty-six. She exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade, churning up the murky water, bringing to the surface a sludge of sloughed-off memories, giving the family ghosts a kick up the backside.'Sisters Vera and Nadezhda must put aside a lifetime of feuding to save their emigre engineer father from voluptuous gold-digger Valentina. With her proclivity for green satin underwear and boil-in-the-bag cuisine, she will stop at nothing in her pursuit of Western wealth.But the sisters' campaign to oust Valentina unearths family secrets, uncovers fifty years of Europe's darkest history and sends them back to roots they'd much rather forget...
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I came across this title and thought it was so odd that I had to get it. Then I read it and it seems like something very common. I did not read this expecting a funny novel. There may have been light hearted parts and it ends well. You will like it better if you don't expect it to be funny. More poignant, less funny.
The main character begins to re-evaluate herself and her family as she finds out all the things they wouldn't say in the process of removing their father's new bride. The characters are more sympathetic than I expected. The ending is happier than I expected as well. This is not my typical genre, but I'm glad I picked this one up.
Two sisters and their elderly father collide as they have always collided in the past but with tremendous force and great frequency when the elderly father falls for a young woman who wants to immigrate to England from Ukraine.
The dialogue is clever and fun and painful and the dad's obsession with tractors is a nice sidebar to the story.
If you've heard that this book has been nominated for all sorts of prizes you might be expecting something different; but if I tell you it reminds me of Anne Tyler or Joanna Harris you might not be disappointed and might even be a little surprised at the steel edge under this tragi-comic family story.
