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.  

Thrive (The Overthrow, Book 3)

(If you haven't, I encourage you to read Bloom and Hatch, Books 1 and 2 in The Overthrow series, first. You'll want to know the whole story. Really.)

 

Written by Kenneth Oppel

HarperCollins

978-1-4434-5691-3

404 pp.

Ages 10-14

May 2021

 

First there were the black grasses, strangling vines and pit plants (Bloom, 2020). Then came the eggs that developed into mosquito birds, giant water striders and horrific mega-worms (Hatch, 2020). Now, in the conclusion to Kenneth Oppel's The Overthrow trilogy, the cryptogens themselves are coming to invade. But will they succeed in overthrowing humans for the planet?

Being a teen is hard enough but, for Anaya, Petra and Seth who have dealt with strange allergies and physical ailments all their lives, things have gotten a lot stranger since learning that they have cryptogenic DNA that has given them extraordinary powers but also unconventional bodies. Anaya is a runner, with unusual body hair and claws. Petra has an affinity for swimming and has scaly skin and a tail. Seth is a flyer with razor-sharp wings and a powerful sound weapon. During the horrific experimentation on the kids and others like them at the hands of the nasty Dr. Ritter, they learned that they are able to telepathically communicate with each other and Anaya was able to connect with the cryptogen she calls Terra. 

 

This connection has lead to the arrival of a ship, at the conclusion of Hatch and the beginning of Thrive, from which a trio of rebel cryptogens have emerged. Terra, who is a runner and scientist as well as pilot, is accompanied by another scientist, a swimmer for whom Petra uses the pronouns ze and zir, and a flyer who was a military leader, hence their moniker of him as the general. Together the three cryptogens had formed an alliance, and a rebel movement of several hundred was established to overthrow the flyers who have used their sound power to keep runners and swimmers enslaved to them. 

The rebels admit that Anaya, Petra and Seth, as well as the other hybrid children, had been implanted with DNA to help produce a virus to destroy the flyers' ability to use sound as a weapon and thus to help them defeat their oppressors. Now the rebels have come to earth to retrieve that hidden DNA.

 

While Petra helps the swimmer to get materials needed to repair their ship and Anaya works with Terra to develop the virus, Seth worries for Esta, a hybrid flyer such as himself, with whom he'd bonded at Dr. Ritter's bunker facility. Learning that Esta, like most hybrid cryptogens, is being detained at an internment camp, Seth sneaks out to rescue her and ends up captured along with Esta and others by the primary ship of invaders. Now Seth has to decide whether he agrees with Esta who believes the cryptogen commander, a flyer, really has their best interests at heart, or whether a rebellion against the flyers is necessary to stop the oppression of the runners and swimmers and an invasion of earth.

Kenneth Oppel pounds out his story of an alien invasion and rebellion with little respite for the reader, just as there was none for the trio of teens who are thrown from one alarming situation to the next. Even before the initial arrival of terrifying plants and menacing creatures, Anaya, Petra and Seth have had to manage their physical stresses. Now with the menace of extraterrestrials, they have to balance being seen as both threats and saviours, and doing what they can, what they want to and what they'd rather not. There's always some new threat with which they must deal and, as they are punched with pressure after pressure, as each new creature and knowledge is revealed, Kenneth Oppel takes the reader with them. As such, Thrive is an intense read, throwing the reader along with the story's characters, from one dangerous situation to the next, manoeuvring on a flying platform, being swallowed by a wall, fighting off a wolverine squid or plunging through the atmosphere in a pod with limited oxygen. The action is relentless and it's not until the very end that Kenneth Oppel lets us know how The Overthrow, the series and the operation, actually turns out. I won't give away the ending but I will reassure that the wild ride that is Thrive leaves room for a sigh and a promise for resolution.

He was half human, half cryptogen, but for the first time in his life, he was starting to feel whole. (pg. 404)

• • • • • • •

The Overthrow (a.k.a. Bloom Trilogy) 

Bloom (2020)

Hatch (2020)

Thrive (2021)

Underland

Written by Colleen Nelson and Nancy Chappell-Pollack
Yellow Dog (An imprint of Great Plains)
978-1-77337-052-1
192 pp.
Ages 12-15

October 2020 

 

So the truth lies buried in the Underland. (pg. 33)

 

Though authors Colleen Nelson and Nancy Chappell-Pollack didn't really leave us hanging at the conclusion of Pulse Point (2018), the book to which Underland is the sequel, they did hint that there was more to learn about the world they created and the inhabitants of the City protected under a dome and the Prims who lived on the Mountain outside of it. In fact, though we'd met Kaia who'd escaped from the City to find out the true nature of her heritage, there is so much more to learn about the City, from its Councillors who govern, the overseers who watch, and Citizens who generate energy through their physical efforts. And now we learn, as does Sari, Kaia's best friend, that there is an Underland to the City, unknown to its above-ground and more privileged inhabitants. 

 

Told in the alternating voices of Ama, a young Under who lives and labours in the tunnels beneath the City, and Sari, who was matched with Councillor Tar's offspring Lev who'd gone after Kaia when she'd fled the City, Underland is a story of separation and convergence. Kept hidden from the Citizens above who believe their own efforts generate power, Ama and her fellow workers, primarily "younguns" who can fit through the narrow tunnels, dig the precious brine which the City above requires to run everything. They believe in Big Mother who gives life and protects them and Old Father who shows his anger when displeased but, except for the two Prims Jacob and Noah who were captured and forced to serve, the Unders only know enslavement and nothing of the world beyond their pit where they live and the tunnels they mine.

 

Above, in the very different world of the City, Sari still feels guilty about being matched with Lev when she'd known how much Kaia and Lev cared for each other. But Tar makes it clear that Kaia was an inappropriate match for Lev and she sees the qualities of a leader in Sari. Curious, Sari looks into Kaia's birth record which reveals a special notation of "intertwining." With the help of Ren, a former classmate and now overseer, Sari learns more about Kaia's origins but also about the Underland.

 

With their worlds in danger of physically and socially collapsing, those of the City and the Underland can no longer remain separate and Colleen Nelson and Nancy Chappell-Pollack's dystopia evolves into something less dissonant, advancing towards the cooperative and diverse.

 

At this time of year, Underland offers hope that acceptance of others and compassion for all is possible. While both the Unders and the Citizens, except for the Councillors and those who oppress those of the Underland, know nothing of the others' existence and experiences, they are part of a social order of epic inequities and horrific discrimination. Based in fear and ignorance, their different worlds would not ever have come together if individuals like Ama and Sari, among a handful of others, had not stepped up and recognized the need for change. For themselves and others, they needed to see beyond themselves.

If I want to move forward, I need to make sure I'm okay with what's behind me. (pg. 157)

With suspenseful action-filled scenes and a wide cast of characters from all levels–geologists, fetal assessment technicians, diggers, mules, bureaucrats, elders, younguns, mothers and more–Colleen Nelson and Nancy Chappell-Pollack have created a grim world, borne of good intentions but managed into the objectionable and worse. Fortunately, Underland inspires faith that a few good people can make the difference and that redemption is possible through transformation. Sometimes it's all we need to go forward.