From Russia with Love: Booktalk 3

Most princesses have a pretty cushy life, right? When we first meet the princess Anastasia Romanovna, her life does appear to be privileged and comfortable. She’s the daughter of the Russian tsar, and she’s got servants, beautiful clothes, and the best food and education available.  She’s pretty, smart, and kind. However, as privileged as she and her sisters and brother may be, their elevated status as royalty is threatened. There are ominous signs all around them that the Russian people [and others] feel tremendous anger and resentment towards Anastasia’s entire royal family. So, how does Anastasia know all this? She’s got a secret boyfriend, Alexander [nicknamed Sasha], who’s in the military.  He’s one of the guards she meets at her palace, and they strike up a friendship. When he’s sent off to war to fight for Russia, he suffers blindness in one eye. When he is recovering from his injuries, Sasha tells Anastasia about how there may be a revolution soon, or anarchy. Anastasia’s days as a princess are numbered, and Sasha warns her about this. Yet Sasha is determined to stay near Anastasia, even when her father abdicates the throne and her mother is arrested. Soon thereafter, Anastasia goes from being a princess to being a prisoner, one whose life is in great danger. Based on a real historical princess, Anastasia’s Secret gives an insider’s account the death of royalist Russia.

Anastasia’s Secret by Susanne Dunlap. 333p. Bloomsbury, 2010. Booktalk to high school.

From Russia With Love: Booktalk 2

Yuri is a teenage boy living in Russia in the 1930s, under a brutal Stalin-like leader. The old rule of the Czars is over: they’ve been murdered and exiled, and no one dares speak of them anymore. The new regime – which Yuri is taught to praise at school – is harsh and unforgiving. People in Yuri’s town live in perpetual fear of being kidnapped and sent away to the work camps, where their chances of survival are slim. Yuri’s parents urge him to keep his mouth shut and his eyes down at the ground. In an unstable police state, anyone can be singled out and disappear without a trace. Yuri’s school is shut down, and he’s forced to do brutally hard manual labor.  When he’s sent to a mining camp in the north for answering a question incorrectly [sentence: ten years], Yuri senses that his life is over. Even if he does manage to get home, his parents may be dead or just gone, like so many others. But youth may be on his side: “Sometimes the sunlight had sparkled so brightly across the boundless sheets of snow. Or, in the stinging wind under the china-blue sky, I’d smelled the blessed spring melt. Once I stood under a tree and my heart sang to see the way its tall brave trunk soared …. I’d watch the eagles soaring overhead. I couldn’t help it” (138).  In a world of bleakness, illness, and semi-starvation, Yuri takes what consolation he can get. The Road of Bones by Anne Fine is gripping historical fiction.

The Road of Bones by Anne Fine. 213 p. Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 2006. Booktalk to high school, adult.