Review: This left me depressed and uncomfortable.
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 07 13, 2014
Only Milan's exceptional writing skill could have accomplished this.While the initial "gift" required my disbelief to be put out to pasture, I was okay with that.  The circumstances of that "gift" were too repellant to me, however.  It just stretched my credulity too far to see "love" when there had only been a few perfunctory words exchanged over the course of three years.I could have moved on from there but the wretched poverty, the lower middle class living on the thin edge of desperation, grasping at the tiniest shred of hope while sometimes living in fear of their "betters,".....this was so pervasive throughout the story that it just beat me down.  The little bits of joy that appeared simply couldn't turn the grim tide for me.I admire Milan's superb mastery of this seldom told story of the era.  It was that superior depiction, I think, that finally did me in.  I felt too much.