Matthew’s chapters alternate with those of Mila, a Young Pioneer living in 1930s Kyiv under the watchful eye of her doting widowed father (and Papa Stalin), and of Nadiya’s cousin Helen in Depression-era Brooklyn. He has been asked to help Nadiya, his hundred-year-old great-grandmother, to sort through her belongings in so doing he starts to piece together the Lomachenko family story. It opens by introducing Matthew, a present-day, screen-obsessed thirteen-year-old living in New Jersey, “basically under house arrest” during the COVID-19 pandemic. Marsh’s affecting historical novel, inspired by her own family’s story, describes the social and political backdrop of the Holodomor, a famine that killed millions of Ukrainians in the 1930s and was covered up by the Soviets (Ukraine was a republic of the USSR at the time). Intermediate, Middle School Roaring Brook 368 pp.
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