Mountain of Crumbs (Gorokhova) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
Slight…but endearing, a collection of well-sculptured memories about the deprivations and joys of [Gorokhova's] childhood in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). It's a book about many things, notably class, politics, identity and sex, but one that circles around as often as not to the author's rumbling stomach.... A Mountain of Crumbs is a minor-key coming-of-age story, one that's tinged with real darkness around its edges.
Dwight Garner - New York Times


[Gorokhova's] exquisitely wrought, tender memoir of growing up in the Soviet Union…could be taught as a master class in memoir writing: the key is not to collect facts and recollections but to truthfully reimagine one's life…Gorokhova writes about her life with a novelist's gift for threading motives around the heart of a story, following its plot with a light touch and unwavering honesty. Each chapter distills a new revelation in poetic prose.
Elena Lappin - New York Times Book Review


Despite the feelings of claustrophobia and low-level menace conjured up, the portrait of a Soviet childhood is dreamily nostalgic.... [Yet] Sometimes it’s hard to believe how limited people’s lives were in Seventies Russia. Gorokhova finds herself, as a young woman, never having been inside a restaurant, not knowing what asparagus is when she reads about it in a book, used to eating all the stale food in the house before being allowed to eat anything fresh. ....In the end her escape is as unromantic as it is unexpected..... The overall result, though, is a stunning memoir: subtle, yet brimming with depth and detail. It leaves you wanting more. A sequel about life in America, please?
Viv Groskop - Telegraph (UK)


Like Angela’s Ashes, the memoir of her one-time teacher Frank McCourt, Gorokhova’s A Mountain of Crumbs opens with a wish that youth had been an easier enterprise.... [But] despite Gorokhova’s debts to McCourt...Gorokhova may lack McCourt’s lush storytelling skills, but her book is also free—thankfully—of his sugary sentiment. A Mountain of Crumbs is a straightforward account of Russia in the postwar decades, one that takes the reader confidently through the slow sinking of the Soviet ship.
Alexander Nazaryan - Christian Science Monitor.


Extraordinarily rich in sensory and emotional detail.... An engrossing portrait of a very lively, intelligent girl coming of emotional and intellectual age in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union.
Bookpage


Artful memoir about the angst and joys of growing up behind the Iron Curtain.... Articulate, touching and hopeful.
Kirkus Reviews