Everything Is Fine

Our childhood was terrible. Our childhood was wonderful. We really are "dinosaur"—another era, another air, everything was different. Attempts to describe to our own children the degrees of freedom and UNfreedom of a Leningrad teenager of the 1980s are doomed: with a one-hundred-percent probability you end up either in sentimentality or in moralizing. Sergey Grechishkin managed to slip between the streams, and our grown children, reading the book "Everything is Normal," will laugh, be surprised, and perhaps understand us better.

After the success of the book "Everything is Normal: The Life and Times of a Soviet Kid" in English (6 thousand copies in the USA within a year or so), its author Sergey Grechishkin decided to create a Russian-language reinterpretation: "Всё нормально. Жизнь и приключения советского мальчика." He translated the book himself, shortened it a bit, and removed some details that were interesting only for Western readers.