All My Friends Are Fictional’s Reviews > The Sunflower Boys > Status Update

I feel like Wachman lost the plot completely at this point.

“Someday, I will miss this place. Someday I will miss the special way the light strikes the earth here. But I don't know it yet. I don't think that young birds anticipate how badly they will miss the sky when they grow too old and frail to fly. I think they just keep flying until one day they wake up in their nests and they can't lift their wings.”

"Don't be sad," he tells us. "This is not a land of war and sorrow. This is your country, sunflower boys. The dirt and the sky and everything in between. It's your inheritance. It all belongs to you."

"Stalin and his men wanted all of our land for themselves. They held us at gunpoint and forced us to grow food only for them. They told us to grow more grain for them than anyone can grow, and when we didn't grow enough, they took our food. … [A]ll I know about Holodomor is what my tato told me. … Some days, the hunger was all he could talk about. Every time I thought I had it tough, he talked about it.”

“I'm accustomed to the potatoes, the dill, the lovage. The sunflowers are different. Maybe it's because they were once so bright and cheerful and now they look dead, and we're cutting them up and leaving their carcasses on the hardening autumn soil. … The sky is overcast, a thick layer of gray clouds that seems to hang lower than usual. … I imagine that we're working under the belly of some enormous beast.”

“Over the years, I've committed his topography to memory. The cordillera of his spine pressing up through the skin of his back. The pale patches that dappled his calves where there had once been cuts, then thrice-picked scabs. I knew exactly which bicycle trick and which tree root was responsible for each one. Yet everything feels new now. The way he breathes, the way he catches light.”

“Yet occasionally there is something amiss without our Tato. His absence sits on our living room couch wide enough for four and sleeps in the unoccupied half of Mama's bed. It speaks in the silent moments at the dinner table conversations, when the three of us have nothing to say and our conversation gives way to the scrape of silverware on dishes.”