Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

Last week was busy, but clearly, it’s a new week and I’m going to finally review a book I finished probably two months ago. (Although only because it’s due and not renewable today.) I’ve been putting off my review of The Blackbird Girls for so long only because I loved it, and it takes more concentration and coherence to review something that’s touched you deeply than it does something that was fun but more up your children’s alley than your own. I’ve had it pinned since before my friend Andrea picked it for book club, but her picking it got me to read it sooner than I would have, and I am solidly grateful for that.

So. Blackbird Girls has three different points of view–Valentina and Oksana in 1986 and Rifka in 1941. Rifka being a Jewish name, it’s not hard to guess that her story focuses on running from and escaping the Nazis; Valentina and Oksana begin the novel in Pripyat, Ukraine–back when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union–and their fathers’ workplace, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, experiences a catastrophic accident. Oksana, whose father has always been loudly anti-Semitic, finds herself evacuating with Jewish Valentina and her mother, her own mother’s radiation levels having sent her to the hospital instead. Train tickets are limited, and with no other real options, Valentina’s mother sends the girls along to stay with her own mother, the grandmother Valentina has never met–and so begins the relationship that is the book’s real focus. What is friendship? What about love? What does love look like? Do the people in our lives always tell us the truth? Why not? What do we deserve? Blackbird Girls explores all of these questions and more, and manages to be both dramatic and suspenseful (rather than overtly philosophical) while it’s doing it. Indeed, the book feels eerily real–or not so eerily so, once you realize that the author had a friend who experienced Chernobyl as a child before emigrating to the US and incorporated much of the friend and her family’s experiences into the story. If you like historical fiction at all, you’re going to want to read this one.

Hmmm. I can’t help feeling like that’s a 3.5 star review for a 5 star book, but it seems to be the best I can do. In the meantime, we tried playing pickleball as a family on Saturday and learned that playing on a seriously windy day isn’t advisable. (I also wanted to strangle each of my children in turn, because they were all making the experience difficult to enjoy–each in his or her own way.) We hit a yard sale on the way home and then had a niece pop in on our family scripture time, so it was a busy day. Yesterday we taught the Sunday school lesson and had family dinner in Clearfield, and this morning I set out to tackle the amount of paperwork piled on the counter by my computer. Hallelujah!