Dad of Divas' Reviews: Book Review - The Genius Under the Table: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain

Saturday, December 18, 2021

Book Review - The Genius Under the Table: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain

The Genius Under the Table: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain



About the Book

With a masterful mix of comic timing and disarming poignancy, Newbery Honoree Eugene Yelchin offers a memoir of growing up in Cold War Russia.

Drama, family secrets, and a KGB spy in his own kitchen! How will Yevgeny ever fulfill his parents’ dream that he become a national hero when he doesn’t even have his own room? He’s not a star athlete or a legendary ballet dancer. In the tiny apartment he shares with his Baryshnikov-obsessed mother, poetry-loving father, continually outraged grandmother, and safely talented brother, all Yevgeny has is his little pencil, the underside of a massive table, and the doodles that could change everything. With equal amounts charm and solemnity, award-winning author and artist Eugene Yelchin recounts in hilarious detail his childhood in Cold War Russia as a young boy desperate to understand his place in his family.
 

My Take on the Book
This is a book that allows you to see life in a world that may be so foreign to the one that you know. While the story is serious and I sometimes the story is sad. That being said it is also a story told through humor. You get brought into the day-to-day life of one family that is living in a society that represses life. You get to see this society through the eyes of a child when adults will not allow him to know what is happening and why is happening.  In the end you leave this book with a much broader sense of life in a whole new world and you leave it with a better appreciation for the life that you have. 

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