Book Review: Chernobyl Strawberries: A Memoir by Vesna Goldsworthy

I got this book for free using netgalley but I promise all opinions are my very own! Book Review: Chernobyl Strawberries: A Memoir by Vesna GoldsworthyChernobyl strawberries
ISBN: 9781843544142

by Vesna Goldsworthy
Format: eARC

Published by Atlantic on 2005
Genres: Great Britain, Serbs, Social life and customs, Television journalists, Yugoslavia, Yugoslavs, Biography & Autobiography, General, Social Science, Customs & Traditions
Pages: 290
Source: netgalley
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three-stars

How would you make sense of your life if you thought it might end tomorrow? Vesna Goldsworthy's formative years were a breeze - a pampered child of the Serbian middle class, a top student at Belgrade University, a presenter of a fashionable radio programme and a poet who performed her work to a crowd of thirty thousand people. At the age of twenty-four she left Yogoslavia for London, confident that she would be just as good at being English. But then, more than a decade later, illness invaded. In prose that is exquisite in its precision, Vesna tells the story of herself, her family and her lost country. Although purportedly an account of forty years in the life of a passionate woman, Chernobyl Strawberries traffics in the births and deaths of whole worlds. Vesna Goldsworthy's captivating memoir about exile, love and motherhood marks the emergence of a gorgeous new literary talent.

why I read this book

I was browsing NetGalley when I saw this title. I thought it was going be a gritty memoir about what I have no idea. The aftermath of a nuclear fallout, maybe?

my review

 

I must admit that I went into this expecting a gritty memoir. I did not get it. It is a memoir where nothing much happens. She says that she wrote this book for her son when she was diagnosed with cancer. I have no problem with that but still. She had a normal happy childhood in Yugoslavia, and she talks at lent about that. I had a more  growing up in the Appalachian Mountains but ok. It was hard to get into this book. I would have DNF’ed it but as a review book I felt obligated to finish it. It did pick up steam when she talks about the war for her BBC radio show. I really liked that part. The rest of it meh. I finally made me a tall glass of a hurricane drink to plow through it. Once properly inebriated I found some sort of poetic beauty in her words. I saw what she was trying to do. Paint a picture of what everyday communism was really like. We hear horror stories about it every day but this was like a sweet gentle lullaby. Until the war part but even that as she was in England it was sort of a detached vibe. Maybe if I went into it with no expectations it would have been different but alas.

it-was-ok

three-stars

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