Fantastic book from the first sparkling paragraph to the moving ending. The narrator is a complete original, a spunky tartar grandmother, one part monster and one part saint, that I find hard to describe. So have to just recommend that everyone read the book for themselves.

I also find myself having a difficult time doing justice to the story. It begins in 1978 in a Russian city with the (soon-to-be) grandmother discovering that her teenage daughter is pregnant. Despite her best efforts to induce a home-remedy abortion, a daughter is born to her. The story centers around these three generations of women with a variety of men serving primarily as a backdrop, mostly husbands and lovers, as they navigate Soviet culture and eventually emigrate to Germany.

History and the passage of time are lightly depicted in a book that covers 1978 to 2008, with the most interest being on the development of the granddaughter and her relationship with the two women that care for her and often trade or steal her back and forth.