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)

Standoff (Kidnapped From Ukraine, #2)

Written by Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch

Scholastic
978-1-5461-0454-4
288 pp.
Ages 8–13
October 2025

 

As it had been for me reading Under Attack, the first book in Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch's Kidnapped From Ukraine series, delving into Standoff was a challenge. I knew to expect a sensitive but authentic story about the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but I also knew that it would be emotionally demanding of me because of my heritage. It was. But it was also eloquent and inspiring and well worth the read.

 

In the earlier Under Attack, readers are introduced to the Popkov family: dad Ivan who worked at the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, mom Yaroslava who worked at a nail salon, and twelve-year-old twin sisters Dariia and Rada. When the first attack occurs in February of 2022, Dariia and her mom are separated from Rada and their dad. The first book covers Dariia's perspective and experiences, while Standoff is told from Rada's point of view from the onset of the first attack. While Dariia and their mom find shelter at a salon and other commercial buildings, Rada and her dad head to the steel plant with its extensive bunkers, and from which he will join up with the Territorial Defense . With the wise words, "Be brave but not stupid" (pg. 42), her dad leaves Rada in the care of the Yanin family: Mr. Yanin, an engineer; his son Viktor, a classmate of Rada's; and his nine-year-old daughter Alina. (Mrs. Yanin was killed in the attack on their apartment building.)

 

Each day is a scramble for food, clothing, water, heat and more. Still, the make-shift family connects with another family when Rada meets Lesia Stepanova. Lesia is sheltering in another bunker at the plant with both her grandmothers (Baba and Babushka), her sister-in-law Maiia, and Lesia's baby nephew Oleh. Lesia's mother is also in the Territorial Defense, while Lesia's older brother is in Moscow on a business trip. After they attempt to evacuate Mariupol during a ceasefire—which the Russians failed to observe—they add nine-year-old Mychailo Voron and a woman named Svetlana Boyko to their little group.

 

Their lives become a series of routines to help them get through each day, whether it is doing lessons, or toileting, or preparing and sharing their meager provisions. Hope comes with the promise of a ceasefire—more than once—though the Russians are quick to apprehend and attempt to transport Ukrainians to Russia. It's only when the Red Cross, the UN, and other international observers and aid are involved that those efforts are stymied.

 

Life is tenuous. On the inside of the plant, Rada and her new family struggle and worry and grieve. Outside, their challenges are both the same and different: worried for their loved ones, grappling with a lack of resources, terrified of being injured or killed, and never knowing whom they could trust. 

 

The attack and war on Ukraine has sadly been part of the news cycle for almost four years, but for many it is a story from "over there." Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch's stories, both Under Attack and Standoff, take a distant conflict and make it personal. This isn't happening faraway to people we don't know. It's happening to children, to the elderly, to parents, and to shopkeepers, neighbours, and people we care about. We feel their horror, recognize their anxieties, grasp their grief, and acknowledge their needs to hold on to whatever might offer comfort, whether a cat or a Motanka doll. Whether it's a middle grader reading this book and stunned by the horrific circumstances that Rada and her families, born and made, endure, or an older reader who understands the cruelty of others and the grief of loss, Standoff will hit hard. But Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch knows how to tell a story of immense tragedy by pairing it with resilience, affection, and hope. Even the title of the third book in the series, which releases in April, tells us that there is more to the twins' stories and, even with more hardships and loss, they endure. 

 

For an authentic and very personal perspective on the war in Ukraine, Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch offers a story of Ukrainians from Mariupol and what they saw and felt when the Russians attacked. She even offers more background in her "Author's Note" and the Q & A with which she appends Standoff, helping young people gain greater understanding about the events and the history behind the Russian invasion. We can only hope that with awareness comes understanding, and with time there will be a favourable resolution for the people of Ukraine.  

 

 • • • • • • •

 

Under Attack (January, 2025)

Standoff (October, 2025)

Still Alive (April, 2026)
 

Under Attack (Kidnapped From Ukraine, #1)

 

Written by Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch

 Scholastic

978-1-546104513

320 pp.

Ages 8-13

January 2025

 

Apologies to author Marsha Skrypuch and Scholastic for my tardy review of this exceptional novel. They kindly ensured I received a copy of Under Attack and, while a gripping read, it has an emotional component for me, making my reading of it far more challenging. But, because it is so well written and told with such compassion and insight, I could not stay away from Under Attack. Years from now, readers will look to Under Attack as an authentic commentary of how the attack on Ukraine that started in 2022 played out for children and their families. 

 

Twelve-year-old Dariia Popkova's story did not just start on February 24, 2022, although this is the starting point of Under Attack. Her life in her family's fourth floor apartment in Mariupol would have been typical. Her father worked at the Azovstal steel plant. Her mother worked at a nail salon. And Dariia and her twin sister Rada went to school, had friends, did crafts, and loved using their cell phones. Then Putin declares a "special military operation" to free Ukrainians from their "Nazi" regime. When the first bomb hits their apartment, Dariia and her mother are separated from Dariia's dad and Rada. With this begins a separation of place and experience as they try to find their way back together.

 

Dariia and her mother shelter in a basement of a school supply depot with many others. Some are strangers like Sonya Marynovska and her four-year-old daughter Ariadna and two Tatar boys Rustem and Asan, but also a classmate Natalia and her dog Mimi. From their basement base, the twenty-eight hunker down, make unsafe outings to scavenge for food and water and get cell phone reception. They are "eating practically nothing, drinking bad water, and hearing the thunder of nonstop bombing overhead." (p. 53) Weeks turn into months and though Dariia and her mom are first looking to get to the Avostal steel plant where her father's army reserve is stationed and Rada is safe, ultimately they get the message to get to the humanitarian corridor and go to Zaporizhzhia, a city in southeast Ukraine. 

This wasn't a war.
This was the Russian Federation executing civilians because they were Ukrainians.
It was terrifying and senseless. (p. 82) 

Stealing an abandoned car, amidst the continued shelling, roaming tanks with white Z markings, and marauding Russian soldiers, Dariia, her mother, Rustem, Ariadna and Mimi the dog don't get very far before they are stopped and sent to a "filtration center" where they are told they would be evacuated to safer parts of Russia. 

 

Dariia, now separated from her mother, is sent with Rustem and other children–Katya, Volodya, Ihor, Dmytro and siblings Lilia and Vadim–to the Romashka Children's Camp where they are told about Putin, the benevolent president, who has helped rescue them from the Nazi regime of Zelensky. The children know it is propaganda but play along.

It made me angry that the Russians had brought me to this prison that looked and smelled like freedom. (p. 136)

When they are sent to their respective Russian "foster homes," the children vow to get in touch whenever they can with a Gmail account Liliya and Vadim had created to drop messages. Separated from any family they might have and each other, they are determined to keep their connections to each other, to the truth and their homeland.

This could be historical fiction. It could have been a story from the 1940s. I wish that it were. But it's a contemporary story from 2022 through the present, recounting the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the continuing war in a fictionalized story. Someday Under Attack will be historical fiction and readers will shake their heads at the senselessness of the war. I can only hope that they'll be looking back from a time when Ukraine is free from Russian oppression and violence.

While a fictionalized story, Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch takes the time and effort to understand the truths, like the truth about how the war started, the propaganda levelled at both Ukrainians and Russians, and the impact of the war on Ukrainians, from children to workers to the elderly. It is a tough story because of these truths which are so distressing and disheartening. Still Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch is a master at telling such stories (e.g., Winterkill, Traitors Among Us, Dance of the Banished, and Making Bombs for Hitler), ensuring a sensitivity to her characters and her readers, and a thoroughness and accuracy of details.

It's fitting that I review Under Attack on a day which Christians commemorate as Good Friday. Like the day, this book is one of grief and injustice. And it is one that requires contemplation. We can only hope that after the grief comes a resurrection for Ukraine and a future of peace. Only history, and Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch's follow-up books in the Kidnapped From Ukraine series, will tell.

• • • • • • •

Standoff, Book 2 in Kidnapped from Ukraine, releases in October, 2025.

 

 

Winterkill

Written by Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch

Scholastic

978-1-338-831-41-2

288 pp.

Ages 8-13

September 2022

 

Our way of life was being erased. We had to figure out a way to escape before we were erased too. (pg. 38)

With a war currently raging in Ukraine, it's easy to remember that Ukraine has suffered oppression for centuries. As it sought independence and freedom, the country was repeatedly targeted and made to suffer. Winterkill is but one story of an attempt to quash a people with a strong cultural identity and fervor for autonomy. 

In 1930, 12-year-old Nyl Chorny lives on a small farm with his parents and younger siblings Yulia (11) and Slavko (9) in the village of Felivka near Kharkiv. Ukraine is currently under the control of the Soviet Communists led by Stalin whose five-year-plan to modernise the country is really aimed at hurting Ukrainians by eliminating small family farms and combining them under large collectives called kolkhozes. Some villagers are buying into the lies told by Comrades Tupolev and Chort–Russians charged with governing them–and shock workers promising tractors, increased grain, and better opportunities. But for those like Tato, Nyl's father, the collectivisation is just a replacement for landlords and will have nothing to do with them. Still, they must abide by the demands of Communist workers who inventory all their goods, ban religious faith, and requisition their grain with the threat of being labelled kulaks and executed or deported. Some Communists are foreign specialists like Canadian George White who will be working at the future tractor factory and truly believes in Communism as does his young daughter Alice. Others have just found a new way to bully and exert control and gain wealth at the expense of others.

 

If you want to eat, join the kolkhoz. (pg. 50)

 

Still the family farms as best they can, managing with less after Nyl's Uncle Illya is executed for being a kulak, and Auntie Pawlina and baby cousin Tanya move in with the family. A bumper crop of wheat, millet and corn in the summer of 1930 has them all hopeful again and the family considers leaving the Soviet Union via Auntie's cousins in Ternopil, a city across the border in Polish Ukraine. But all those dreams go up in smoke when soldiers steal all the grain while the families celebrate the harvest.

Relying on foraging, hunting and fishing for food, and no way to get money needed for travel, Nyl and Slavko steal away to work in Kharkiv where the tractor plant needs construction workers. But what they find there is as dismal as at home though they are able to make some money. Still, what they return home to is worse than they could have expected. Whether any of them will ever survive, much less escape, a genocide by starvation and violence is Nyl's story to tell.

Winterkill is a big story. It is so big that I can't possibly reveal all the details and nuances of Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch's story in a short review. There are good people and evil ones, both Ukrainian and Russian. There is joy and heartache, resourcefulness and laziness, greed and generosity. And there is oppression. Though much of Winterkill deals with the Holodomor, the 1932-1933 genocide of Ukrainians by starvation, it's a story that's bigger than that. It's about that oppression of people and culture. There is resilience, as Nyl demonstrates with his story, but there is death and destruction and horrific suffering. And Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch tells it with such authenticity that this book of historical fiction could be a biography. Still, she tells it with sensitivity and compassion and allowed this  Ukrainian-Canadian to read it with appreciation, albeit filled with sorrow.

🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻 

Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch will launch Winterkill at the Brantford Public Library’s downtown branch on Thursday, November 24, 2022, at 6 p.m. Copies of the book will be available for purchase from Green Heron Books for signing by the author.  

Don't Tell the Enemy

Written by Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch

Scholastic Canada

978-1-4431-2839-1

184 pp.

Ages 10-14

January 2018

The Soviets have oppressed the Ukrainian homeland of twelve-year-old Krystia Fediuk for centuries but their occupation since 1939 has been a reign of terror for the Ukrainians, Poles and Jews in the town of Viteretz with appropriation of homes, imposed hunger, deportation to slave camps and execution.  With the Germans marching into Ukraine in 1941 and the Soviets fleeing, there are initial hopes and even proclamations of Ukrainian independence.  But the good spirits that come with the egress of their oppressors and the bestowing of food, as well as the opening of the church, are soon suspended as the Nazis begin to show their true objectives.

Krystia, her younger sister Maria and their mother Kateryna live amongst a diverse neighbourhood of Jewish, Ukrainian and Polish families of both modest and wealthier means and a Catholic church with resident priest, surrounded by farms.  Some residents are already gone, whether deported to Siberian slave camps, executed by trigger-happy Soviets or in hiding from the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, like Krystia's Uncle Ivan.  Regardless of atrocities, life must go on, and that includes taking their cow Krasa to pasture daily, tending to the garden, feeding the chickens and fetching water, always keeping their heads down to avoid suffering the wrath of the Soviets.  But when the Germans roll in, their community begins to change in different ways.  In addition to the Nazis, refugees from Germany as well as Volksdeutsche–ethnic Germans from Slav countries–begin to flood the area and force the displacement of residents.  Then the summons from Commandant Hermann begin, first naming a hundred Jewish men and declaring them to be murderers of those imprisoned by Soviets. The community is stunned when the men are shot and amassed in a single grave. 

The terror of the Nazis escalates with their acceptance of Aryan, German and Volksdeutsche as The Master Race and all others as subhuman, with particular targetting of the Jewish people, both in mass executions and then segregation into a Jewish Ghetto.  After her Auntie Iryna goes to live with the insurgents in their forest encampment, Krystia takes on the role of courier of photos and falsified documentation.  With food rationed to starvation levels, fines imposed for random acts and their Jewish friends in danger of imminent death, Krystia and her mother take increasing risks to survive and help their friends and family. 

...that the way to honor our family and friends was to be strong and to live and to tell their stories. (pg. 177)

Based on the true story of Kateryna Sikorska and her daughter Krystia Korpan, Don't Tell the Enemy reveals the often overlooked position of Ukraine during World War II when the terrorism historically imposed by the Soviets escalated to horrors which many believed would be appeased by the Germans.  But invasion is invasion and oppression is still that.  The shift from the Soviets persecuting all in their community to the brutality levelled by the Nazis against the Jewish people and those who might help them is especially tragic.  A simple life of family and work now becomes an exercise in survival and even more perilous with the pitting of groups of people.  No one should have to choose.  While some appear to do so easily and heartlessly, there are others like Krystia and her family who demonstrate incredible courage and resilience in the face of death and fear.  Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch in her author's notes mentions that she almost wrote this as a piece of non-fiction but chose to tell it as a fictionalized account to do the story justice.  She chose well and admirably tells a story that needs to be read to appreciate the circumstances of those living in western Ukraine during World War II when enemies were plentiful, dangers ubiquitous, survival precarious and a few good people could make all the difference.

≥≤≥≤≥≤≥≤≥≤≥≤≥≤≥≤≥≤

Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch launches Don't Tell the Enemy next week in Brantford Ontario.  The author is a passionate speaker and sure to captivate attendees with her reading and sharing of writing this new book.  Details about the launch are provided here.

Underground Soldier

by Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch

Scholastic Canada

978-1-4431-2437-9

192 pp.

Ages 8-12

January, 2014

OK–I admit it.  I love everything Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch writes.  Maybe it's because she writes to inform and touch, eloquently accomplishing both without teacher- or preacher-speak.  Maybe it's because we're both Ukrainian, though not all her stories have a Ukrainian focus.  Maybe it's just because she writes great books.  I suspect it's the latter but I would never deny the others.  I knew that I would appreciate Underground Soldier, as I did its prequels: Stolen Child (Scholastic Canada, 2010) and last year's Silver Birch Fiction award winner Making Bombs for Hitler (Scholastic Canada, 2012), reviewed here.  See if I'm not right.

Stolen Child focused on Larissa, a young Ukrainian girl, who struggles to deal with confusing memories before her adoption by a Ukrainian family in Brantford.  Her older sister, Lida, is the primary focus of Making Bombs for Hitler, as an enslaved Ostarbeiter taken by the Nazis.  Another Ukrainian, Luka Barukovich, becomes an ally of Lida's, though his escape from the camp hospital leaves her wondering and worrying about his fate.  Underground Soldier is Luka's story, from his escape to his desperate need to return to Kyiv (the largest city in Ukraine) and reconnect with his father who was taken to Siberia by the Soviets.

Sent to the camp hospital from whence most leave dead, Luka is encouraged by Lida to find a way out which he does, hidden in a truckload of dead bodies.  His escape from the truck is just the beginning of a tortuous journey towards the mountains that he knows will link with the Ukrainian Carpathians and home.  It's not surprising that, with the Nazis taking his mother and enslaving him while the Soviets arrested his father and oppressed the people of his homeland, Luka is cautious and suspicious of anyone he encounters on his journey.  The enemy is everywhere and everyone.  A Ukrainian-speaking German couple, Helmut and Margarete, are one of his first allies, though he has much to fear when he learns that both their sons are Nazis.  As he continues his trek, Luka is reminded of the many incidents, both personal and national, that have shaped his distrust of both the Nazis and the Soviets.  With the repeated and horrific losses of life and whole-scale destruction, Luka realizes Ukraine and its people are spoils of war, to take or destroy as need be.

His journey is helped when he meets Martina Chalupa, a Czech girl, whose skills in tracking, evading detection and survival are superior to his.  After they are helped at an underground hospital of the Ukrainian Red Cross, Luka and Martina join the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) to help protect and defend against both the Soviet Red Army, the NKVD (the brutal Soviet law enforcement agency) and the Nazis, both from targeted attacks, death camps, and large-scale destruction.  Even after Hitler commits suicide in 1945, UPA is still committed to fighting Stalin and his NKVD, as Luka is to finding his loved ones: his father, his mother and Lida.

Underground Soldier is not an action war story; it is a sobering tale of a people wedged between two evils with no "winning" possible.  Those who seek the thrill of an enemy-laden, gun-fighting game between good guys and bad guys will not find it here.  The horrors of war are evident as is the compulsion to save loved ones and survive.  But Underground Soldier is a more involved story, obviously painfully researched by Marsha Skrypuch, to include all aspects of World War II and its aftermath as endured by Ukrainians such as Luka, Lida and Larissa and by so many others.  The story revealed information that I could link to my own family's history, as I'm sure it will for many Ukrainians whose parents or grandparents lived through WWII in Ukraine and environs.

In this emotion-laden plot-driven story, Marsha Skrypuch will touch new readers to this trilogy and provide closure for those who've read Stolen Child and Making Bombs for Hitler.  There is no happy ending for any of war's victims, but by providing clarifying details and authentic experiences of those whose stories are embedded here, Marsha Skrypuch honours both the past and the future of Ukrainians and other victims of World War II everywhere.  Informing and touching, Underground Soldier is Marsha Skrypuch through and through.