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rieviolet's review against another edition
dark
emotional
informative
sad
medium-paced
4.5
I started this book without any expectations and I was pleasantly surprised. I know almost nothing about this chapter in the history of Eastern Europe, so it was a really eye-opening reading experience, if extremely sad and harrowing.
I think that if you like family sagas in your fiction, you might like this memoir as well. There is an element of mystery as you gradually discover, alongside the author, her family history that keeps you engaged and that can also surprise you.
I liked the writing style and there were some sections of nature writing that I appreciated particularly, and usually I am really not a big fan of nature writing.
The author also includes many different means of narration (e-mails and letters, a family member's diary, extracts from other texts, even photographs), and this makes for a varied and more engaging storytelling.
The web of familial relationships gets progressively more complex and it can become a little confusing (especially because a family tree is not included, at least in my digital copy), so that at times I struggled to remeber who someone was and how they were related to someone else and I had to just go with the flow.
Also, there are many brutal sections that are hard to get through, and I completely understand their presence in the book given the subject matter, but I found some parts a bit too graphic in their details, and unnecessarily sofor example, I don't think that including a scene where, after a bombing, her maternal aunt is carring a young man's intestines is going to add anything vital to the narrative.
I think that if you like family sagas in your fiction, you might like this memoir as well. There is an element of mystery as you gradually discover, alongside the author, her family history that keeps you engaged and that can also surprise you.
I liked the writing style and there were some sections of nature writing that I appreciated particularly, and usually I am really not a big fan of nature writing.
The author also includes many different means of narration (e-mails and letters, a family member's diary, extracts from other texts, even photographs), and this makes for a varied and more engaging storytelling.
The web of familial relationships gets progressively more complex and it can become a little confusing (especially because a family tree is not included, at least in my digital copy), so that at times I struggled to remeber who someone was and how they were related to someone else and I had to just go with the flow.
Also, there are many brutal sections that are hard to get through, and I completely understand their presence in the book given the subject matter, but I found some parts a bit too graphic in their details, and unnecessarily so
Content Warnings
Graphic: Bullying, Child abuse, Child death, Confinement, Death, Domestic abuse, Genocide, Gore, Mental illness, Suicide, Toxic relationship, Violence, Xenophobia, Grief, Death of parent, Murder, War, and Deportation
Moderate: Alcoholism, Gun violence, Misogyny, Pedophilia, Physical abuse, Rape, Antisemitism, Medical content, Cannibalism, Sexual harassment, and Classism
Minor: Adult/minor relationship, Animal death, Cancer, Chronic illness, Incest, Suicidal thoughts, Torture, Blood, Vomit, Abortion, Fire/Fire injury, and Injury/Injury detail