Symphony of monsters A novel

Fiction has always held a mirror to world events in a way few other art forms can. In Levy's ripped-from-the-headlines novel, the forced abduction of tens of thousands of Ukrainian children by Putin's marauding army is crystallized in the kidnapping of Valentyn, the mute nine-year-old son of Veronika, head nurse at Rykove Hospital. From the moment he is whisked from his school to his imprisonment at a Russian boarding school to his sham "adoption" by Putin's Commissioner of Children's Rights, Valentyn's life-altering nightmare is reflected in the desperate actions taken by his teenage sister, Lilya, and their mother to secure his freedom. As Veronika reflects, "If the occupiers won the war, it wasn't just her country that would disappear; even the memory of it would be lost. The invaders needed to delete the past, to rewrite history in a way that would justify their ideology and erase their crimes." History has taught that the world has a way of becoming numb to tragedies such as the forced deportation of Ukrainian children. By crafting a humanizing narrative on a subject that receives insufficient media coverage, Levy's valiant, unflinching novel goes a long way to ensuring such atrocities will not be so easily ignored.

Levy (The Heart of Everything) tackles Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine in this affecting thriller about a mother's desperate search for her missing son. Veronika Khodova serves as the head nurse for a medical clinic in the Ukrainian village of Rykove. Following the Russian assault, she yearns for the Russians who killed some 200 of her neighbors to face justice. Her desire for revenge becomes increasingly personal when her nine-year-old son Valentyn is abducted as part of a sophisticated deportation plot: Putin's Children's Rights Commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, has established a program aimed at taking 200,000 Ukrainian children to Russia to become Russian Federation citizens, ostensibly in the children's best interests. Levy details the search for Valentyn from the boy's perspective, as well as those of his mother and his older sister, Lilya. Along the way, he supplements his suspenseful plot with details ripped from the headlines; at one point, Lvova-Belova notes how the Trump administration's policy of separating the children of illegal immigrants from their parents inspired her scheme. This joins the shelf with Martin Cruz Smith's Hotel Ukraine as an effective fictional reckoning with the horrors of the war in Ukraine. Agent: Susanna Lee, Susanna Lee Associates. (Jan.)Correction: An earlier version of this review misstated the age of the main character's son.