Plus, it was sandwiched between Nicholas Sparks ( ughhh!) and "Eat, Pray, Love" ( blerghhh!). Never before have I bought a book because of title alone. I had to give this prize-winning novel a whole extra star just for that. Check! Nottingham! Right there on page 124. Check! After the farcical golddigging-hussy-is-trying-to-marry-my-father story comes the what-my-dad-did-in-the-holocaust section.ĥ - In case that bastard Paul Bryant reviews your novel on Goodreads, namecheck his home town to put him in a good mood. Check! Check! Check! For instance, the narrator is a sociology lecturer but her sister keeps calling her a social worker - that's quite funny on page 37! And there it is again on page 83, 96, 114 and 289.Ĥ - But make sure your readers know that this isn't just a trivial make-fun-of-the-daft-immigrants farce by adding in some DARK FAMILY HISTORY which since this is all about Ukrainians might well be pretty dark indeed. As the story rolls along she's forever nudging your ribs and smirking loudly and huff-huffing at the silly things her characters do.ģ - Invent a bunch of lovably eccentric types - a VERY lovably eccentric yet exasperating yet LOVABLE father is recommended, everyone likes one of those. When I was reading this today and the doorbell rang I thought that was her come round with some freshly baked pampushky. Check! Boy oh boy does our first person narrator want you to like her. Check! She's British Ukrainian and this is all about British Ukrainian stuff.Ģ - Decide on a strong central narrator and give them a winning personality. This reads like the author has earnestly followed some kind of How To Write a Comic Novel course.ġ - write about what you know.
With her proclivity for green satin underwear and boil-in-the-bag cuisine, she will stop at nothing in her pursuit of Western wealth.īut 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.
Sisters Vera and Nadezhda must aside a lifetime of feuding to save their émigré engineer father from voluptuous gold-digger Valentina. 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. He was eighty-four and she was thirty-six. Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamorous blonde Ukrainian divorcée. Lewycka tells the side-splittingly funny story of two feuding sisters, Vera and Nadezhda, who join forces against their father's new, gold-digging girlfriend. A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian was bestselling author Marina Lewycka's bestselling debut novel which has sold over one million copies worldwide.
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