Informative and thrilling!

This book was really good. When I read it, I hadn’t enjoyed a book as much as this one in a while.

Rating: 4 stars

“If communism is Paradise, why do we need barriers, walls, and laws to keep people from escaping?”
Through a thrilling narrative and the perspective of a stubborn 17-year-old, we get a peek at what life was like under the communistic regime of Ceausescu in Romania. It does a great job at showing how fear overshadowed everyday life, how people were suffering mentally and physically, and how the government operated, which was disturbing. People whispering in their homes, wary of possible listening devices. Having to stand in line in the freezing cold for hours to get potatoes, only to return home with an onion the size an olive. Being careful with what you say and who you say it to, for everyone can be an informer. Even family members or friends. The fact you never know who you can trust or not, adds suspense to the story. Especially given how the protagonist has become an informer himself, reluctantly (this is not a spoiler). That shows it could happen to everyone, since the regime blackmails and threatens people. I think the book does a great job in showing what such a regime can do with people, like setting everyone up against each other.

“Be careful, Christian. A revolution eats its heroes.”

Themes such as oppression, surveillance and resistance really speak to me, so it was right up my alley. The book was also very informative, Ruta Sepetys has clearly done her research. The story and characters are fictional, but the setting and suffering described in the book were not. I actually learned a lot from reading it and found it very interesting. Some things even had me gasping while reading, because they were so outrageous and I had never thought such things had happened, which only underlines why a book like this is so important: it sheds light on dark periods in history we should never forget about.

Despite all this, I didn’t feel a strong connection with the characters and I think they could have been written more proactively and could have been more fleshed out. Normally that would have bothered me, but in this book it didn’t. The informative nature of the book hooked me, the story was interesting enough and it wasn’t that the characters were bad. It just had more potential. In other words: the book should have been longer, if that would have provided more depth.

Still very much worth reading, I recommend it!