Month: April 2023

Posted in Ruta Sepetys

I Must Betray You by Ruta Sepetys

Posted on by roxtao

SYNOPSIS:

Romania, 1989. Communist regimes are crumbling across Europe. Seventeen-year-old Cristian Florescu dreams of becoming a writer, but Romanians aren’t free to dream; they are bound by rules and force.

Amidst the tyrannical dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu in a country governed by isolation and fear, Cristian is blackmailed by the secret police to become an informer. He’s left with only two choices: betray everyone and everything he loves—or use his position to creatively undermine the most notoriously evil dictator in Eastern Europe.

Cristian risks everything to unmask the truth behind the regime, give voice to fellow Romanians, and expose to the world what is happening in his country. He eagerly joins the revolution to fight for change when the time arrives. But what is the cost of freedom?

A gut-wrenching, startling window into communist Romania and the citizen spy network that devastated a nation, from the number one New York Times best-selling, award-winning author of Salt to the Sea and Between Shades of Gray.

REVIEW:

My blood was trembling in my veins during this entire read. I’m familiar with Ruta Sepetys’ work, so when I found out that her next book is about the Romanian communism and revolution I didn’t know how to get it faster. I have no idea if her new novel will impress readers from other countries as much, but as a Romanian born during the communism, I have to take my hat off to the impressive work the writer has done. I’m in an awe that such a well documented book can be written by someone who not only is not Romanian, but had absolutely no previous connection to Romania until just a few years back. I can’t imagine how many years Ruta worked in order to aquire such amount of information, but the fact that there is a list of five (5!!) pages of sources at the end of the novel, gives you an idea about the amount of documentation needed in order to create such a realistic story.

It’s not just the romanian words that are thrown everywhere in the book. If the writer wouldn’t have used any, the impact would have been exactly the same. But every single description of the places, the atmosphere, the interactions or the feelings is literally screaming “Romania”. The book might not impress by the amount of shocking events. Or at least not until the last few chapters. But it builds such a dense tension that you can feel it covering your soul, your thoughts, just by recreating the normality of those years. The scepticism, the doubt, the constant feeling that you’re being watched and heard, the habit of always looking over your shoulder. The hunger, the darkness and the cold. The whispers, the suffocation. And over everything, the fear. The constant fear, the paralyzing fear that never goes away since you are a child and until you die. In you and in every single person around you. The fear becomes as normal and everlasting as your breathing, crushing your mind, your will, your dreams, your voice, bending you as a human being, bending an entire society.

Any revolution is a fight for freadom, a scream against suffering and distress. But what we often forget and what this book emphasizes is that a revolution is not only agains the system. It’s also against your deepest fears, agains your survival instinct that tells you to stay hidden, to stay safe, against your mother telling you not to go out, because outside it’s dangerous, against you leaving your friends in danger in order to go out there and confront an even greater danger. Because it’s not just about you, it’s about everything and everyone around you and all the generations following.

Between the pages of I Must Betray You are decades of pain that an entire country had suffered. Things that, depending on our age, we either lived or heard so much from our parents or grandparents that seem almost normal or unimpressive. For us, this is just how things were, that’s it. But for readers born in countries that were always free, for people unfamiliar with what communism meant, all our normality will look appalling. Ruta Sepetys doesn’t offer a history lesson. She literally takes you from your comfortable present and throws you in the past, in the middle of the history, living and feeling along with the characters inside the book.

Posted in Audrey Niffenegger

The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

Posted on by roxtao

SYNOPSIS:

This is the extraordinary love story of Clare and Henry, who met when Clare was six and Henry was thirty-six, and were married when Clare was twenty-two and Henry was thirty. Impossible but true, because Henry suffers from a rare condition where his genetic clock periodically resets and he finds himself pulled suddenly into his past or future.

In the face of this force they can neither prevent nor control, Henry and Clare’s struggle to lead normal lives is both intensely moving and entirely unforgettable.

REVIEW:

I have a lot of feelings about this book but all of them are kind of floating in a pool of boredom. I believe the main reason for that is the fact that the book is so unnecessarily long and stuffed with details that don’t really contribute to anything. There are authors that have the talent to narrate even shopping list in an extremely captivating way. Unfortunately, for me, Audrey Niffenegger was very far from that. But putting this aside, the novel does have an intriguing side and that’s why I didn’t abandon it midway.

There is something unsettling about this book, especially the first half of it, when Clare is still young. Yes, the story is interesting, cute, funny (although sometimes the humor feels a bit forced) and sweet, but somewhere above all these nice feelings, you cannot stop feeling uneasy. Despite the fact that the characters are doing their very best to do everything morally right, something still feels wrong. You cannot exactly pinpoint how you would expect them to behave in such a situation. And I believe the author was very intentional for the readers to feel this way.

I loved the dinamic of knowledge between the two protagonists. Although you would expect Henry to be the only one with all the information – and in the beginning, everything seems to encourage this belief – later things switch to the exact opposite, for a period of time. It kind of makes sense, but it’s still a very unexpected twist.

I did like the fact that science gets to play a role in the story even if it doesn’t solve the mystery. But the fact that the protagonist looks for a medical explanation for his condition does offer a more realistic approach. Unlike some of the other aspects that are making it very hard to see the characters in a relatable way: the house full of servants, the unlimited flow of money, the artsy vibe of the protagonists. But still, those things are enabling the characters’ story so they were only mildly annoying.

I heard about this book for such a long time and was always curious about it, so I’m happy that I finally read it. But I am more happy now, that I’ve finally finished it than I was during the reading. And it’s never a great sign when a book feels more like a task.