` My father & I head towards a nervous breakdown as he attempts to erase three years of Communist indoctrination in the course of a single evening. I simply cannot comprehend that Lenin, the friend of all children, is now allegedly an arsehole.` When 7-year-old Mischka & her family flee the oppressive USSR for the freedom of Vienna, her world seems to divide neatly in two: there`s life as she knew it before, & life as she must re-learn it now. But even as she`s busy dressing her new Barbie, perfecting her German, & gorging on fresh fruit, Mischka is aware that there`s part of her that can never escape her homel&, with its terrifying folktales, its insidious anti-Semitism, & its old family secrets. As her parents` marriage splinters & her sister retreats into silence, Mischka has to find her own way of living when her head & her heart are in two places at once. There is darkness galore in this novel. But there is also much comedy to be had in its twisted enchanted tales. It is as seductive & unsettling as similar work by Angela Carter or Margaret Atwood, while it shares a geography with Everything Is Illuminated & If I Told You Once.