Still Alive (Kidnapped From Ukraine, Book 3)

Written by Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch

Scholastic Press

978-1-5461-0457-5

320 pp.

Ages 8–12

April 2026 

 

 

While the war on Ukraine by Russia continues to this day, Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch is ready to resolve the story of twins Dariia and Rada Popkova. The story that began with Dariia's perspective on the attack and invasion of Ukraine in Under Attack (2025) after the girls' separation, and that led to Rada's story in Standoff (2025) comes full circle with a story that brings families together. They are still alive and fighting for themselves, each other, and their country.

 

Still Alive begins in November of 2022 with Rada and her mom living in a ski village in the Carpathian Mountains. Mom works as a manicurist at the Hotel Karpaty, and they are preparing to move into their prefab home in a new refugee area in nearby Prytulok. They receive unexpected messages from Dariia, who has been "adopted" by a Russian family in a Moscow suburb, with details about her "new" name and birthday, as well as those of other Ukrainian children who had been kidnapped to Russia. So begins their fight to get Dariia and the other children back to Ukraine.

 

With the help of Save Ukraine, a Ukrainian charitable organization whose initiatives includes rescue and reunification of children taken from Ukraine, Mom and Rada and their new family of friends get to work trying to find families of others so that they might rescue as many as possible. But it's an arduous task as all must be done legally, finding legal guardians, obtaining powers of attorney, and more.

 

The second part of the story comes after Dariia is rescued and comes to live with Mom and Rada. She may be back with much of her own family—the whereabouts of her soldier father are still unknown—but she must navigate a new reality. She and Rada may be twins but they have always been different. With the traumas that they have endured, it's not just being together like it had been. Here's healing that has to happen but still with the mission to help their country. In fact, they do even more. They find a way to...

...take a shattered world and make it into something beautiful. (pg. 273) 

A series titled Kidnapped From Ukraine does not intimate a story of joy.  Of course, a story based in the ongoing war on Ukraine could be nothing less than horrific. While Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch is an author who tells real stories, she is also one who handles them with sensitivity, aware that there is a way to tell an impactful story and still offer reassurance. With Still Alive, Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch remind us that this war is not over, and that people are still suffering. Rada's question about the senselessness of this war—"How much hate does it take to kill your neighbour with missiles aimed at churches, children, hospitals?" (pg. 43)—resonates throughout the book as Ukrainians consider atrocities, new or repeated. Their reactions are as diverse as their experiences but their resolve to do what they can—build drones, sew camouflage nets, feed abandoned animals—to save Ukraine is unmistakable. 

 

The Kidnapped From Ukraine trilogy may be disheartening in the nature of its story, but Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch heartens it by comforting young readers with a narrative of families, made and found, and hope for a new future.

 

Under Attack (2025)

Standoff (2025)

Still Alive (2026)