4.5
The Little Communist Who Never Smiled
By Lola Lafon & Nick CaistorPublisher Description
An award-winning novel powerfully re-imagines a childhood in the spotlight of history, politics, and destiny. Montreal 1976. A fourteen-year-old girl steps out onto the floor of the Montreal Forum and into history. Twenty seconds on uneven bars is all it takes for Nadia Comaneci, the slight, unsmiling child from Communist Romania, to etch herself into the collective memory. The electronic scoreboard, astonishing spectators with what has happened, shows 1.0. The judges have awarded an unprecedented perfect ten, the first in Olympic gymnastics, though the scoreboard is unable to register anything higher than 9.9. In The Little Communist Who Never Smiled, Lola Lafon tells the story of Comaneci's journey from growing up in rural Romania to her eventual defection to the United States in 1989. Adored by young girls in the west and appropriated as a political emblem by the Ceausescu regime, Comaneci's life was scrutinized wherever she went. Lafon's fictionalized account shows how a single athletic event mesmerizes the world and reverberates across nations.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communities4 Reviews
4.5
Naomi Brun
Created almost 2 years agoShare
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Mänō
Created over 5 years agoShare
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emilie w
Created almost 7 years agoShare
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“Incredible. I'm pretty sure if I had read the original French it would have been even better, the translation might have been a bit off at times. I had a hard time putting this down. Beautifully laid out.”
gleefulreader
Created almost 8 years agoShare
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“The Little Communist Who Never Smiled is a fascinating re-imagining of the life of Nadia Comaneci as told through the narrator and her imagined dialogue with Nadia herself while writing her biography. While the set-up is rather odd (and might leave you reaching for your phone to sort out how much of what is written is accurate), ultimately it works. The biographical details are interesting and I did spend a fair bit of time googling to see video of the routines or biographies of individuals referred to in the book. However, the bigger payoff comes in the deeper examination of the use of the female gymnasts and their bodies as a battleground in the propaganda war within Romania, between east and west, and between the western bloc countries themselves, and the imagined effect this had on the girls themselves. For a fairly slim novel, this book covers a lot of territory. Highly recommended.”
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