Here's the issue: I can fully understand why people would love this book but I don't. It has down-to-earth people depicted as caricatures while still being real. It's like sitting with someone, flipping through a photo album, and hearing all the stories about all the people in the pictures. I can understand why someone would love that, but personally I do not. There's no sense of the timing of when events happen, just a general before/during/after WW2. I was uncomfortable with how often the father would be "flying into a rage" but equally that line got so boring from how many times it happened; I understand that's probably the aim of the repetition but it just didn't work for me.