Winterkill

In a timely, hard-hitting novel, Forchuk (Traitors Among Us) portrays the manufactured famine Holodomor (“murder by hunger”) that Stalinists inflicted on Soviet Ukrainian farmers in the early 1930s. Compassionate 12-year-old Nyl narrates the harrowing story, which opens with the ethnically Ukrainian family—Nyl, his parents, and siblings Slavko, nine, and Yulia, 11—just managing to keep their farm going in February 1930. Stalinists, including foreign sympathizers, inventory the countryside’s residences, forcing farmers to give up their land and join collective kolkhozes. Yulia is quickly won over to the cause, even in the face of Soviet deceptions such as the plundering of the family’s harvest and livestock, and the deaths of several relatives. Desperate to earn money for their family’s food and possible flight, Nyl and Slavko escape to work in a Soviet tractor factory and, as Nyl realizes the Soviets’ true goals, he eventually joins with others who are working secretly to expose Stalin’s genocidal actions to the outside world. Juxtaposing concepts of industrialization with the rhythms of farm life, the story and its grim events, together with an elucidative author’s note, provide important historical context around history that has resonance for current events. Ages 8–12. (Nov.)