I had very high hopes for this book…but although it was a good read, it left me slightly disappointed. I think I had heard so much hype about it that the book just couldn’t live up to it. I would probably have enjoyed it more if I hadn’t heard anything about it beforehand.

It is quite amusing in parts, but not laugh-out-loud funny. What it does though is give glimpses of how hard it must be for immigrants trying to integrate into a new society, and how WWII affected ordinary citizens, caught up in the conflict through no fault of their own. The most interesting character for me was the sister Vera. She sounded awful at first, but I had quite changed my opinion of her by the end.

I really tried to read this book, I’ve gone half way through but my patience is gone. I’m just not curious about it anymore there’s nothing to keep my interest in this book goin. The writting style not to my taste- sounds like my writting style, really- which is really simple, not very capable of capturing a thousands pictures in a paragraph. The only think I am curious about is what happens in the end to Valentina and the old father. My theory is that probably VAlentina is a good woman at heart and they make friends or something like that ( that would be a twist, heh?). I don’t care about the conflict between the sisters, to me it seems vaguely related and I didn’t get the point of the reader knowing about it. I found it hard to go through page by page by page without getting any pleasure out of it, just scanning for the info ‘will she get the visa or not’. There’s better stuff out there.