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A review by tessalitwish
Something Unbelievable by Maria Kuznetsova
4.0
It has been a while since I’ve picked a book up and basically didn’t put it down again until I was done. I loved every SINGLE character, but it was truly hard to resist Larissa and her deadpan humor and stark but loving observations and criticisms of people and life in general.
Brief summary:
New Yorker actress Natasha is a new mother with a lot of ambivalence about a lot of things. Over Skype, she asks her grandmother (Larissa, in Kiev) to tell her the story of her family during WWII and the events that led to Larissa’s grandmother’s death.
Both stories were fascinating. The parallels of Larissa/Misha/Bogdor and Natasha/Yuri/Stas made this book fun to read, which is probably not the best adjective to use given a lot of the subject matter that this book tackles- but that’s why I’m a reader and not a writer.
I most strongly connected with Natasha’s struggle as a new mother. I also felt a lot of ambivalence about my newborn (I remember calling him an “amorphous blob with no personality- which is pretty close to “human puddle”) that has since gone away and been replaced with an insane amount of love and amazement. Here’s a section from the book that I resonated with big time:
“She’s come such a long way from the human puddle I gave birth to, though she’s got a long, long way to go. And yet, there are so many things my daughter can do that I wish I could—sleeping through the wild street sounds, facing the brutal, cold world with absolute wonder, smiling for no reason at all—but I have unlearned all of her survival skills, and one day, she will unlearn them, too, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”
Honorable mention to the cover design- I loved it and thought it captured the book perfectly.
Thank you to Random House and NetGalley for the review copy!
Brief summary:
New Yorker actress Natasha is a new mother with a lot of ambivalence about a lot of things. Over Skype, she asks her grandmother (Larissa, in Kiev) to tell her the story of her family during WWII and the events that led to Larissa’s grandmother’s death.
Both stories were fascinating. The parallels of Larissa/Misha/Bogdor and Natasha/Yuri/Stas made this book fun to read, which is probably not the best adjective to use given a lot of the subject matter that this book tackles- but that’s why I’m a reader and not a writer.
I most strongly connected with Natasha’s struggle as a new mother. I also felt a lot of ambivalence about my newborn (I remember calling him an “amorphous blob with no personality- which is pretty close to “human puddle”) that has since gone away and been replaced with an insane amount of love and amazement. Here’s a section from the book that I resonated with big time:
“She’s come such a long way from the human puddle I gave birth to, though she’s got a long, long way to go. And yet, there are so many things my daughter can do that I wish I could—sleeping through the wild street sounds, facing the brutal, cold world with absolute wonder, smiling for no reason at all—but I have unlearned all of her survival skills, and one day, she will unlearn them, too, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”
Honorable mention to the cover design- I loved it and thought it captured the book perfectly.
Thank you to Random House and NetGalley for the review copy!