´My mother and brothers died because of our religion. Most of our family was wiped out. And today we still aren´t free to worship. When does it end? I will be cautious, but I refuse to live in a cage´.
Set in various locations in what once used to be the Soviet Union during different timeframes, The Blackbird Girls by Anne Blankman is an YA with a very complex structure. The complexity encompasses both the characters development and the narrative construction.
The story is going back and forth on two time streams: the first covers events during the Great Patriotic War - the Soviet term for the military confrontation between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union between 1941 and 1945; the second, the predominant one, is set in the aftermath of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. The two historical periods are connected through the characters common to both timeframes.
The fathers of teenage girls Valentina and Oksana were working at the nuclear plant and will die following the accident. Valentina is Jewish. Oksana´s father, a frustrated violent person, taught her daughter to distrust Jews repeating a trope so familiar to my ears in way too many different contexts and languages: ´Jews weren´t Soviet citizens. They were intruders´. Fate united the two girls that from enemies will turn into best friends during their stay at Valentina´s grandmother, Rita/Rifka, in the then Leningrad - nowadays St. Petersburg. As Oksana has to return to her mother, that meanwhile found a new partner, she is going again through abusive episodes, but her newly best friend which happens to be a very creative inventive person, has a solution that will take her away from the cycle of family violence.
The story is not only complex, but has new twists every couple of paragraphs. I am not a regular consummer of YA, but literally I hardly wanted to take a break before discovering the new story development. The characters themselves are coping with a lot of traumatic events - abuse, parental alienation, loss, loneliness, to mention only a few - that are part of their personal story in the making. During their personal journey through troubled historical times, they are changing, learn how to survive and discover the good and the bad of the human nature. The voices of the children are not only adequate to the usual life experience at this stage - their hopes that in the end, things will be fine with their fathers and life will resume its normality made me seriously think about how hopeless is hope (Hope: A tragedy in the words and thoughts of Shalom Auslander describes so adequately this feeling).
The Blackbird Girls is a book with predominant female characters where the males are just disposable, short appearances in the train of life. For the YA audience of 2021, the events accounted in the book, situated in a very remote time - WWII, Chernobyl, the hardships of the everyday life in the Soviet Union, especially for Jews (and who are those Jews, anyway, some young reader may ask) - are seamlessly inserted into the story, without too much ado, but offering enough elements to make sense of the story.
Last but not least, an extra point to the marvelous cover.
Rating: 5 stars
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