| Summary: |
"Larissa is a stubborn, brutally honest woman in her eighties, tired of her home in Kiev, Ukraine, tired of everything in life, really, except for her beloved granddaughter, Natasha. Natasha is tired as well, but that's because she has just had a baby, and she's struggling to balance her roles as a new mother, a wife, an actress (or she used to be, anyway), and a host to her husband's greasy-haired, useless best friend, Stas, who has been staying with them in Brooklyn. When Natasha asks Larissa to tell the story of her family's Soviet wartime escape from the Nazis in Kiev, Larissa reluctantly agrees. Perhaps Natasha is just looking for distraction from her own life, but Larissa is desperate to make her happy, even though the story hurts to tell. But as she recounts the three-year period when she fled with her difficult sister, their parents, and grandmother to an abandoned army village in the Ural Mountains, and the series of unfortunate events that occurred there, such as near starvation, a cholera outbreak, a tragic suicide, and a complex love triangle with two brothers from a privileged family--neither Larissa nor Natasha can anticipate how loudly these lessons of the past will echo in their present moments. Navigating between Larissa and Natasha's perspectives, then and now, Something Unbelievable explores with piercing wit and tender feeling just how much our circumstances shape our lives and what we pass along to the younger generations, willingly or not"-- |
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