Your Ad Could Go Here is the first book I've read by a Ukrainian author and it was interesting to say the least. This book is a series of short stories that all appear to have moral messages, critiques of society and many of them appear to have almost magical realism elements to them as the line between reality and make-believe becomes very thin. My biggest problem with some of these stories was that I found them a little bit difficult to follow at times, and events in them were unclear. It wasn't until I got further into the stories that things became clearer.

The second short story examined a female friendship which crossed boundaries as the two young girls seemingly had a deeper relationship. However, this changed when one of the girls was found in an unseemly situation. This altered their behaviour towards each other and seemingly changed the trajectory of their lives. It tackled issues of stigmas around gender, sexuality and mental health. I thought this was an interesting short story that I could connect with and was one of the better ones.

The third short story was particularly disturbing as it examined sibling rivalry in a village. It paralleled the story of Cain and Abel with two sisters (although I'm not entirely familiar with the Bible story). This one definitely ventured into magical realism territory as one of the daughters made a wish with a creature that visited her in the night after her sister ruined her life. It was all very twisted and fairly unsettling.

The final short story was probably the one I highlighted the most as this looked at ideas of motherhood, the menopause, rape, stardom, and family relationships. I think the most powerful aspects were when the mother Olah spoke about how mothers have many scars on their body: stretch marks, veins, cuts etc, but they were willing to take that toll in order to have a child and provide for them a better future. This was quite a powerful message and there were lots of other rather quotable sections that stuck out to me.

Overall, this felt like a very mixed bag of short stories. I was hoping to learn more about Ukraine when reading them, but that wasn't really the vibe I got. Ultimately I would say I'm a little disappointed, but glad I took the chance to read these.