Books You Can Feel Good About: Ukraine

Thursday, December 5, 2024

What I Left For You (Echoes of the Past Volume 3) by Liz Tolsma

A Family’s Ties Were Broken in Poland of 1939

Deeply heartfelt story from WW2 with timeslip to 2023, Great-great Grandmother to Great-great Granddaughter of Lemko/Rusyns heritage.

You can feel through them their strength - and hope - through the tears. The Polish people had been taken over or relocated many times over the years - they seem to have been regarded as a lesser race. Who can understand the need for Ethnic Cleansing? To wipe out a nationality of people? Or the sheer cruelty of starvation, no sanitation, separation of families, taking their means of living and property? Even the little things that mean something to them of love and family. It more than breaks your heart. Today we have the means to stay in touch or research people and areas so much easier. It also shows us the resilience and perseverance that allow a person and a people to survive and leave descendants to carry on a family line. Very interesting and informative, profoundly moving - it should be a classic. You leave a piece of your heart with the characters.

I received this book free from the author, publisher and NetGalley. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

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Tuesday, May 24, 2022

The Memory Keeper of Kyiv by Erin Litteken

This is a story that is difficult to read, haunting. The writing and storytelling make you feel like you're there, but that's the problem. It starts in 1929 in Ukraine when things were still mostly normal for Katya and her family, but it changed quickly. Per the author between 1932 and 1933, one in every eight Ukrainians died in this manmade famine. Stalin had taken over, requiring that the people "support the state" by turning over everything they had, forcing collectivization on them. People who didn't comply were killed or deported, taxed beyond being able to pay. This story of survival was recorded and revealed in 2004, this story flipping back and forth between times to explain what happened. Seventy years later, a young widow discovered her grandmother’s journal that will reveal the long-buried secrets of her family’s haunted past. The high cost of survival from treatment like this, treatment over years. Riveting, heart wrenching, hard to put down. This country is at war again with Russia, so it's even more important to be reminded of what happened there before. Hard to believe that it could happen again now in this day and age.

I received this book free from the publisher and NetGalley book review bloggers program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

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