Well I noted the other day that I hadn’t read this book yet. Well now I have… obviously.
I must admit, for a book that’s won prizes for comic fiction, I didn’t find it terribly funny. It takes a serious-ish subject and handles it with a very light touch. But I’m not sure I’d go the whole hog and call it comedy.
Nadezhda and her sister Vera get upset when their father falls in love with and marries a Ukranian women who’s significantly younger than him. She’s obviously a gold digger who’s just waiting to pop his clogs. But you probably know all this, since the entire world and his mum has read the book already.
It’s an easy going read taking no time at all to fly through, and is a very believable portrait of a long settled Eastern European family in Britain. It reminded me of a Polish family I knew a bit at school, with a lot of very broken English spoken at home (you just knew that Polish was the lingua franca when I wasn’t around at the house).
It happily saw me to work and back a bit this week.