Books › Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, A
Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, A
336 pages
A fluffy pink grenade of a domestic comedy that detonates to reveal the dark, buried traumas of twentieth-century Europe.
What it feels like
Reading this book feels like being invited to a chaotic family dinner where the plates are flying, only to end up staying late into the night listening to devastating, whispered secrets. It moves at a brisk, highly entertaining clip, driven by the sheer absurdity of an elderly father’s infatuation with a cartoonishly greedy younger woman. The narration is steeped in wry, exasperated humor, capturing the specific madness of adult siblings forced to cooperate. Yet beneath the slapstick exterior and the boil-in-the-bag cuisine lies a profound, bittersweet exploration of the immigrant experience and the long shadow of the Holodomor. It will delight anyone who appreciates a tragicomedy that uses sharp, farcical wit to crack open the heavy vault of history.
- Mood
- chaotic
- bittersweet
- tragicomic
- nostalgic
- Tone
- wry
- farcical
- exasperated
- darkly comic
- affectionate
- Pace
- brisk
- Themes
- intergenerational trauma · immigrant identity · family dysfunction · aging and vulnerability · the shadow of history
- The writing
- Sharp, observant, and delightfully absurd, seamlessly shifting from slapstick comedy to stark, lyrical reflections on historical tragedy.
- The arc
- Begins as a laugh-out-loud domestic farce before deepening into a poignant, sobering exploration of wartime survival and familial reconciliation.
- Who it's for
- Readers who love dysfunctional family comedies that use biting humor as a Trojan horse for exploring deep historical trauma.
Content notes
- elder exploitation
- references to war and famine
- grief
- family estrangement
About the book
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...
Description from Open Library.
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