Book recommendations from the Pacific Northwest
Strong Roots book review
Currently available in the Enchanted Trowel Little Free Library.
Book Review: Strong Roots: A Memoir of Food, Family, and Ukraine
I did not set out to buy a book about Ukraine.
I was wandering through an independent bookstore in Leavenworth, Washington, doing what readers do best, drifting, grazing, listening for a title to whisper. When I picked up Strong Roots: A Memoir of Food, Family, and Ukraine by Olia Hercules, I thought first of something I always tell my children: grow strong, deep roots so you don’t fall when the wind blows. Only later did I realize the book’s roots ran straight into a part of my own story that I rarely speak about.
My heritage is Russian Mennonite. Like many Mennonites, my family fled the Russian Empire in the late 1800s after losing their military exemption. In 1873, Mennonite delegations searched North America for fertile land, and eventually many settled across the plains of Kansas and beyond. We were ethnically German people who lived in what is now Ukraine, under Russian rule. Ukraine, as a modern nation, did not yet exist in the way we understand it today, and yet the soil, the kitchens, the language, and the customs shaped who our ancestors became.
Over time, much of that heritage faded in my family. My grandfather was a quiet Kansas rancher. I never knew my great-grandparents, and I never thought to ask my dad enough questions about our history. I regret that now. The one tradition my father held onto fiercely at the end of his life was pride in Ukraine. He flew a Ukrainian flag in front of his house until the day he died. As the war rages on, I’ve carried that forward, even while quietly wondering: Am I Ukrainian if Ukraine did not yet exist? Am I Russian? Am I German? Or am I simply someone shaped by all of it?
Strong Roots gave me a gentle way into exploring that question.
The memoir follows the author’s journey into her family’s Ukrainian past through food, memory, and travel. Rather than offering history as dates and borders, the book offers it as lived experience, through kitchens, markets, grandparents, and meals passed hand to hand. The story reminds us that culture is not abstract; it is tasted, smelled, cooked, argued over, and loved.
One line that stayed with me is when the author reflects that food becomes a kind of inheritance, a way to remember when stories disappear. She writes about how identity lives not just in documents, but in what families “carry to the table.” Another moment that resonated describes roots not as something fixed, but as something we keep uncovering, even when we thought they were gone.
What struck me most was how Strong Roots does not pretend heritage is simple. It allows space for contradiction, belonging to a place that has changed names, borders, and politics, while still belonging emotionally to the people who lived there. That felt familiar. My family’s Mennonite story is layered: Dutch and German Anabaptists, settlers in Prussia, farmers in Ukraine under the Russian Empire, refugees, Kansans, and now Americans. Somewhere along the way, the recipes thinned, the language vanished, and the questions went unasked.
My dad loved pickled beets and borscht. I hate them with intense passion, and not even nostalgia can convince me to introduce them to my own family. And yet, reading this book, I realized food is not just about taste, it’s about continuity. Even what we reject still marks us as belonging to something older than ourselves. After all, the borscht (and beets in general) is one of the only real cultural things that carried over into my father’s generation. Food is such an integral part of what makes a people.
Strong Roots offered me an unexpected connection to a part of myself that feels quietly lost. It reminded me that ancestry is not about claiming a nationality so much as honoring a story. Ukraine may not have existed as a nation when my ancestors lived there, but the land, the kitchens, the winters, and the fields existed. The people and the roots existed.
This memoir is gentle, reflective, and deeply human. It is for anyone who has ever wondered what happened to the traditions their family dropped along the way, or felt the ache of not asking enough questions while they still could. This is something I felt and mourned deeply when my dad passed away. The last trip I made with him was after my grandmother’s funeral, as we drove through the countryside with my dad explaining where the farmhouses of my grandparents and great-grandparents used to be. I saw the fields that must have looked like heaven to those fleeing. I paid attention, but I didn’t know that yet another loss was coming and more history would fall into the void.
In the end, Strong Roots doesn’t tell you who you are. It invites you to listen for where you come from, and maybe, finally, to grow into it. And, reading it made me realize that I carry more of that heritage than I realized. “A vegetable patch and an orchard are burnt into our country’s DNA, indelibly part of our cultural heritage.” Something my father created in our little plot of land in a suburb of Dallas, Texas and something I am creating in a suburb of Seattle, Washington. So, maybe the roots are stronger than we realize even when we don’t know what we are passing down.
Book Review: Five Stars, Highly Recommend.
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