Wide-ranging ... Complex yet swift-moving ... Ioffe brings together the stories of her own female relatives along with those of many other Soviet women.
Interspersed with flashes of memoir, family stories and journalistic encounters, the book acts as a gender-inflected primer on the past hundred years of Russian history ... She writes with warmth, charisma and exuberance and is adept at zooming in and out, mixing precise personal detail with broad historical insights ... Cleverly conceived and brilliantly executed.