The Memory Keeper of Kyiv: The most powerful, important historical novel of 2022

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Personally, I don't like dual-timeline narration; one timeline always drags the other timeline down and it's usually the story set in the past that suffers.

Im zweiten Erzählstrang lernen wir Cassie kennen, die im Haus ihrer Großmutter ein Tagebuch findet und eben dieser schmerzlichen Vergangenheit auf die Spur kommt. Furthermore, she perceives that her granddaughter and great granddaughter could benefit by learning about her experience recovering from trauma all those many years ago. I love historical fiction because facts in history books are all well and good but to experience it on the page from a personal perspective is something else.Dass die aktuellen aktuellen Ereignisse und der Veröffentlichungstermin so zusammenfallen würden, war von der Autorin nicht vorauszusehen, nicht geplant und ein großes Päckchen mehr, das die Stimmung des Buches beeinflusst, wie ich finde. The book has earned glowing blurbs from bestselling authors Kate Quinn and Christy Lefteri ( “The Beekeeper of Aleppo”) and is already set to be translated and republished in a dozen different languages.

Je leest over de grote liefde van Katya en de vreselijke dingen die zij, haar familie en andere bewoners van Oekraïne hebben moeten meemaken. The book didn’t use Ukraine for the sake of it but actually incorporated its people, its culture and its values into the storyline. Written before the present atrocities in Ukraine, this is a tough book to read, but it needs to be read.

But not many are aware that Stalin’s efforts to force collectivism and tamp down Ukrainian nationalism left an estimated 3.

The happiness of her growing-up years was destroyed overnight as Stalin’s gang arrived in her village to set up collectives to replace traditional land-holdings. The Memory Keeper of Kyiv is told in a dual timeline fashion with alternating PoVs; Katya in the 1930s in Tetiiv Raion of the Kyiv Region and Cassie, 2004 in Illinois. The result of all this was that people began to die of hunger, setting off a vicious circle: as people weakened and died, production fell further.In the 1930s, Ukraine, which had been a prosperous grain-producing region, was hit by a famine known as the Holodomor, in which one in eight Ukrainians is said to have died of starvation as a result of Stalin's forced grain confiscation plan. I based the idea of this fictional village in Tetiiv Raion of the southwest Kyiv oblast area because that was one of the hardest hit areas during the Holodomor. And although Ukraine has declared its independence, it remains at the mercy of the German occupying troops, while Symon Petliura’s Ukrainian nationalists are camped outside the capital. Cassie's story's weaker but was a relief as she has also known loss that is put in perspective as she learns the hidden history of her grandmother. Despite the issues I had with the modern timeline, the historical part of the book was enough for me to be a satisfied reader.