Daughters of Victory

A former aristocrat who embraced the uprising in 1905 Russia shepherds her granddaughter through similar difficult choices during the 1941 Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in the engrossing latest from Saab (after The Last Checkmate). Svetlana Petrova joins her uncle Misha in the Socialist Revolutionary Party, leaving her noble family behind. After 10 years in a czarist prison, she travels to Moscow, where she learns Misha was assassinated during the 1917 revolution and reunites with Kazimir Grigoryevich, her former lover and the father of her daughter, Tatiana, whom she left at a church in Kiev. Though Kazimir suspects Svetlana is a bourgeois infiltrator, she remains determined to aid his anti-Bolshevik efforts with the Socialist Revolutionary Party. Fast forward to 1941 U.S.S.R. where Svetlana, now blind, lives in a remote village in the Vitebsk region. Though Tatiana now despises her, believing Svetlana abandoned her to continue her fight within the Socialist Revolutionary Party, Svetlana agrees to have Tatiana’s daughter, Mila, stay with her as the German army approaches. While seeking to keep Mila out of harm’s way, Svetlana eventually realizes that the survival of her granddaughter may require her to face secrets from her past. Saab brings a magnetic authenticity to the proceedings as her richly drawn characters make life and death decisions. Historical fiction fans will be riveted. Agent: Kaitlyn Johnson, Belcastro Agency. (Jan.)