Something Unbelievable
A Novel
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
An overwhelmed new mom discovers unexpected parallels between life in twenty-first-century America and her grandmother’s account of their family’s escape from the Nazis in this sharp, heartfelt novel.
“A fresh perspective—one that’s both haunting and hilarious—on dual-timeline war stories, a feat that only a writer of Kuznetsova’s caliber could pull off.”—Fiona Davis, New York Times bestselling author of The Lions of Fifth Avenue
Larissa is a stubborn, brutally honest woman in her eighties, tired of her home in Kiev, Ukraine—tired of everything really, except for her beloved granddaughter, Natasha. Natasha is tired as well, but that’s because she just had a baby, and she’s struggling to balance her roles as a new mother, a wife, a struggling actress, and a host to her husband’s slacker best friend, Stas, who has been staying with them in their cramped one-bedroom apartment in upper Manhattan.
When Natasha asks Larissa to tell the story of her family’s Soviet wartime escape from the Nazis in Kiev, she reluctantly agrees. Maybe Natasha is just looking for distraction from her own life, but Larissa is desperate to make her happy, even though telling the story makes her heart ache. Larissa recounts the nearly three-year period when she fled with her self-absorbed sister, parents, and grandmother to a factory town in the Ural Mountains where they faced starvation, a cholera outbreak, a tragic suicide, and where she was torn in her affections for two brothers from a wealthy family. But neither Larissa nor Natasha can anticipate how loudly these lessons of the past will echo in their present moments.
Something Unbelievable explores with piercing wit and tender feeling just how much our circumstances shape our lives and what we pass on to the younger generations, willingly or not.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kuznetsova (Oksana, Behave!) tediously unfolds the story of a new mother's relationship with her Ukrainian grandmother. As Natasha Schulman waits for her "soul to be filled" by her infant daughter, she's encouraged by Stas, her husband's friend and a "waiter-slash-poet-slash-heartbreaker" who has been crashing in their New York City apartment, to pursue her languishing acting career. Over Skype, Natasha's grandmother Larissa Fyodorovna recalls events leading to her own grandmother's suicide during WWII after the family was evacuated from Kiev to a remote town. Then 13, Larissa was torn between two boys: "striking, dashing" Misha, whom she eventually married, and his "smug and excitable" younger brother. Stas, privy to the women's conversations, suggests Natasha stage a one-woman play of Larissa's story, and Natasha invites Larissa to come see it. Larissa, a cigarette-smoking widow, is colorfully drawn, though her blunt, mean-spirited dialogue often reduces her to a cliché: the baby is "hideous" and "rat-faced"; Larissa's sister was "smelly" and "spoiled"; Stas looks like an "impudent long-haired homosexual." Clear parallels between Larissa's adolescent crushes and Natasha's marriage are made unnecessarily explicit, as when Natasha asks if Larissa regrets her choice of whom to marry. While the characters can be lively, there's not enough to hold readers' interest.
