To end this post in a happy note (besides the rating), what can you say about this book? Nothing, you can only whisper. Every Romanian carried a world inside them, and mine had quickly gone from dark to black.įollow the last couple of months before the communist regime ended in Romania (officially, at least) through the eyes of a teenager in need of expressing himself. He has to whisper, he has to write, he has to not trust anyone. He looks at his surrounding and knows-knows that life shouldn’t be this way, soundless, cold, filled with fear, only that he can’t say it aloud. Cristian Florescu, a high school student during the communist years of Romania, is the one to catch her attention this time. Like in her other novels, Sepetys focuses on teenagers and on an important moment of their life. Again, not that it changed anything really, only impressed me more. A gut-wrenching, startling historical thriller about communist Romania and the citizen spy network that devastated a nation, from the 1 New. It didn’t actually change the reading experience, but it did make me see everything in a new light and perhaps appreciate her writing even more. As a writer of historical fiction, Sepetys’ greatest strength is her dedication to research. Months of caution and paranoia cascade into a frightening series of bloody protests. Much of the book unfolds slowly, creating a foreboding sense of rising tension, until the dam suddenly breaks. Probably my favorite fun fact about an author, but Ruta Sepetys is a Lithuanian American whose father was refugee. The novel is a master class in pacing and atmosphere.
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