The Genius Under the Table: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain

Product Description
With a masterful mix of comic timing and disarming poignancy, Newbery Honoree Eugene Yelchin offers a memoir of growing up in Cold War Russia.
Drama, family secrets, and a KGB spy in his own kitchen! How will Yevgeny ever fulfill his parents’ dream that he become a national hero when he doesn’t even have his own room? He’s not a star athlete or a legendary ballet dancer. In the tiny apartment he shares with his Baryshnikov-obsessed mother, poetry-loving father, continually outraged grandmother, and safely talented brother, all Yevgeny has is his little pencil, the underside of a massive table, and the doodles that could change everything. With equal amounts charm and solemnity, award-winning author and artist Eugene Yelchin recounts in hilarious detail his childhood in Cold War Russia as a young boy desperate to understand his place in his family.
From School Library Journal
Gr 5 Up-Yelchin has created an unforgettable portrayal of one family's experiences living in the Soviet Union during the Cold War in his ingenious memoir. Using expressive drawings, Yelchin enhances his story of growing up in Leningrad. Yevgeny, his brother Victor, father, mother, and grandmother all share one room in a communal apartment. Each figure is shown to be beautifully human, flaws and all. Victor is a wonderful ice skater who began by skating behind trucks in traffic; the father is a stern Communist who loves Russian poets, such as Osip Mandelstam; the mother works for the Vaganova Ballet School and adores Mikhail Baryshnikov; and the grandmother is keeping a secret about their grandfather. Every evening, all the furniture in their one room living space has to be moved to convert it into their bedroom. Yevgeny sleeps under the dining room table, where he draws on the underside of the table each night with a pencil he has taken from his father. When his drawings are discovered, Yevgeny earns the nickname of "The Genius Under the Table" from his family and begins to study drawing. With an engaging and likable subject, Newbery Honor author Yelchin offers a poignant look at growing up during Cold War-era Soviet Union that will fascinate readers. VERDICT Recommended for those who love captivating memoirs mixed with humor.-Susan Catlett, Green Run H.S., Virginia Beachα(c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review
Darkly humorous. . . Yelchin’s breezy pencil illustrations brim with a charm and childlike energy few artists can capture.
—The New York Times Book Review
The self-effacing narrative seamlessly blends in Cold War history, Soviet politics, and loving family interchanges, and Yelchin's sly illustrations appear on almost every page. There's not a lot of material about this time period, and this humorous, informative, and engaging memoir will keep readers entertained.
—Booklist (starred review)
This memoir of [Yelchin's] adolescence is a forthright, darkly humorous and indelible portrait of an artist emerging. . . Yelchin, wonderfully, allows his text and pictures to interrupt each other with glee, reminding us how life begets art. It certainly does here.
—The Horn Book (starred review)
Yelchin delivers a darkly humorous slice-of-life account of growing up in the Soviet Union. . . . Humorous, heartbreaking, and ultimately hopeful
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
In this frank, engaging memoir, Yelchin (
Spy Runner) recounts his childhood in the U.S.S.R. as his boyhood self, Yevgeny, perceives and ponders it. . . . At once comical and disquieting, the book is an illuminating introduction to a young life in the former Soviet Union.
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
The multitalented author/illustrator here turns his lens on his own life as a child in Soviet Russia during the 1960s and ’70s. . . . with any luck Yelchin will follow this with a second autobiographical volume.
—The Bulletin of the Center for Children'