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 ”‘Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamourous blonde Ukrainian divorcee. He was eighty-four and she was thirty-six. 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.’

Sisters Vera and Nadezhda must put aside a lifetime of feuding to save their emigre engineer father from voluptuous gold-digger Valentina. With her proclivity for green satin underwear and boil-in-the-bag cuisine, she will stop at nothing in her pursuit of Western wealth. But 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…”

This book is supposed to be a comedy, albeit one shot through with bitterness, but I admit it actually felt to me like an overwhelmingly sad tale. There was nothing redeeming about the horrid Valentina who might have started out as pathetic and absurd but quickly became a thoroughly nasty piece of work. Enough evidence was given of her supposed suffering and towards the end she is presented as a victm but I’m afraid it just didn’t wash with me. She was simply too nasty.

I also disliked the father though as the book went on and more of his background was fleshed out I came to feel that he was much more human and I had a great deal of sympathy for him even if the whole horrid situation was largely his fault. I also came to like Vera, even if she too could be nasty she was still human and I could understand her. Nadezhda I liked and she is the reason this book works. A likeable and sympathetic narrator was definitely needed and she fills the role well.

What this book did give me, and a lot of the sadness I felt comes from this, was an insight into modern Ukraine. It’s an ancient country with much in its past to be proud of but, if the conversations towards the end of the book are anything to go by, it has totally lost its way. Valentina is held up as an example of the rampant capitalism and obsession with all things Western that has engulfed it. I felt the discussions of Ukraine were done well and presented in a balanced way even if they sometimes bordered on the simplistic.

I would recommend this, especially to others who have an interest in the region and its history, but a word of warning -it may be marketed as a hilarious romp but it is nothing of the sort. It is an intelligent, penetrating and overwhelmingly sad book that’s very well worth reading.