Never judge a book by its cover

Here's why.

This afternoon, I visited the Books by Weight exhibition where they—you guessed it—sell books by weight. How else? There I came across a hardback with an uninspiring but intriguing title. And now I'm kicking myself for not picking it up.

The book was A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (2005), a 336-page novel by Marina Lewycka, who, I read later, was born in a refugee camp in Kiel, Germany, after World War II.

I did not read the back of the book at the time. I weighed the book in my hand, looked at the cover, raised my eyebrows and nodded my head, so to speak, and put it back in its place.

This is what the award-winning debut novel was all about.

"Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamorous blonde Ukrainian divorcée. He was eighty-four and she was thirty-six. She exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade, churning up the murky water, bringing to the surface a sludge of sloughed-off memories, giving the family ghosts a kick up the backside.

"Sisters Vera and Nadezhda must (set) aside a lifetime of feuding to save their émigré engineer father from voluptuous gold-digger Valentina. With her proclivity for green satin underwear and boil-in-the-bag cuisine, she will stop at nothing in her pursuit of Western wealth.

"But the sisters' campaign to oust Valentina unearths family secrets, uncovers fifty years of Europe's darkest history and sends them back to roots they'd much rather forget..."

See what I meant. I'm sure you feel like kicking me too.

This "hilarious" book has over 300 reviews on Amazon. I read and liked quite a few of them including this little piece by Georgie.

"The deceptively light tone has baffled some reviewers into believing this is not a good book, but if you look at what it actually tells you about the famine and war in Ukraine, you'll find the whole of human tragedy is there. If you prefer to feel like you're reading an annotated text book then perhaps this is not for you. This is how Eastern Europeans deal with the deep betrayals they have dealt with in living memory - cry about it, laugh about it, grow some vegetables and get on with it. This, I assume, is why the author has chosen to deal with the topic in this faux-comic way. It's a lovely, touching read with well-realised characters."

So now you know what I missed. Never judge a book by its cover. 

Coming up: Pictures from Books by Weight, now more or less an annual feature on my blog.