The Madonnas of Leningrad by Debra Dean
The narrator is descending into Alzheimer's, and her long-repressed memories of her time being sheltered in the Hermitage during the Siege of Leningrad are becoming confused with her present day life.
It was a quick read, but honestly, for such heavy subject matter (on both ends), it felt very slight. I wanted it to be better.
There's a brief author's note at the end where she talks about visiting Russia and the Hermitage after finishing the book, and she had some great things to say about expectations of travel, when you go to see a place/thing in person after studying it for so long.
I was also struck by her comments on the Russians she met, and their relation to history, vs Americans' relation to our own history. And then she said something that surprised me, because while this was something I knew, I don't think I'd learned about it in school - she met a Russian woman who was a child of the Cold War like the author, and was of course surprised to later learn that Americans weren't complete monsters like they'd been led to believe from the Cold War. And, of course, vice versa.
Obvious, of course, but it was striking to read that, and about how the Russians helped defeat Hitler, but as American schoolchildren, that was glossed over for a long time (still, I suppose, unless you're studying the war more in depth), probably because it didn't jive with the whole Cold War story the government had created.
Anyway, I'm rambling. I was speeding through the book, just not really caring, but after reading that author's note at the end, I realize I'm more interested in the history itself, and should have gone right to some nonfiction about the siege, rather than a fictional version of it.
His books were a huge part of my adolescence, I absolutely love his unique writing style.
That's the kind of nonfiction I like.
