A review by jessrad505
The Clothes On Their Backs by Linda Grant

4.0

I thought this book was great. I don't understand some of the 2 star ratings and people who said it was boring. It is a coming of age story, a story of discovering your roots, and a story of coming to terms with who you are and where you come from. Clothing does play an important role, as the title suggests, but in a way that paints important pictures of the main characters - Vivian Kovaks and her uncle Sandor. Clothing is very important to each character but for entirely different reasons. For Sandor it is about showing off, looking important, for Vivian it is for hiding in a sense. But for each of them, the clothes they wear is also a way of reinventing themselves. And in a way it is also what connects them to each other. I found parts of this book to be humorous, and parts to be sad, but very compelling throughout. A very good exploration of the immigrant experience and even more so the experience of those first generation off-spring who are often forced to live between two worlds - the culture their family comes from and the culture of this new environment.