Reading in English because
1 - Want to see what its like reading this if given to English friends
2 - Easing myself back into reading in Georgia

Disregarding the various spelling, punctuation and grammatical mistakes (fully due to the poor translation), I think if you want to get a cultural reference across languages, you should atleast try and explain it somehow first. I understand for Georgians reading in Georgian the cultural references will come across much easier (and even reading in English as a Georgian they come across nicely) and thus don’t need explanation but if you want foreigners to fully understand cultural references explaining them in parantheses or maybe footnotes or something would’ve been nice! Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis does this very nicely.

As for the actual story itself, absolute tragedy. On one hand, their desperation to escape the USSR is not only extremely sobering and saddening but tragic. On the other hand, spoiled-for-the-time children of Georgian higher society who romanticised a victim-less hijacking is simply ridiculous to think about. People were going to die, THEY were probably going to die (either through capital punishment or something going wrong on the plane) and I just dont know why they went through with it. The saddest thing about the situation is Father Tevdore/Temur Chikhladze, being killed just so they could spread a bad visage of the Orthodox Church.

Horrifying to read about what they did to Tinatin’s baby.
Writing/the prose in English worth only a 3.5/5, story itself deserves a 5, just could’ve been written about better i think.