ACCESS DIGITIZED EDITION
Guide/Reviews Database
OLDER FICTION
McCrina, Amanda

Traitor

368 pp. | Farrar | August, 2020 | Trade ISBN 978-0-374-31352-4 $18.99 | Ebook ISBN 978-0-374-31354-8 $9.99
(2) YA In 1939, instigating World War II, Germany and subsequently the Soviet Union invaded Poland and divided it between themselves along the Curzon Line. But Germany later swept past the Line, attacked Soviet forces, and set off bitter warfare, making the Polish region of Galicia and the city of Lwów a battleground. Enter Tolya Anatoliyovych Korolenko, a seventeen-year-old sniper with the First Ukrainian Front of the Red Army, and Aleksey Yevhenov, a Ukrainian nationalist. Tolya's mother, a Catholic Pole, and his Ukrainian peasant father have been murdered, and Aleksey is the son of Yevhen Kobryn, a jailed Ukrainian nationalist leader. McCrina places the dual and asynchronous narratives of Tolya and Aleksey against a complicated historical backdrop involving the German Army, the Red Army, Polish Resistance, Ukrainian nationalists, the UPA (the military arm of the Ukrainian nationalists), the NKVD (the Soviet secret police), and all the people caught in the winds of war. Though readers will need to make good use of the lists of characters and military organizations in the back matter to keep straight who's fighting whom and when, lively dialogue and exciting action sequences (with graphic violence) will pull them through the story, told with the same intelligence and scrupulous attention to historical detail as the novels of Elizabeth Wein (Code Name Verity, rev. 1/12) and Ruta Sepetys (Between Shades of Gray, rev. 5/11).
Reviewer: Dean Schneider | Horn Book Magazine Issue: November, 2020

RELATED 

OLDER FICTION

What Beauty There Is
by Anderson, Cory
OLDER FICTION

Between Perfect and Real
by Stoeve, Ray
OLDER FICTION

Zoe Rosenthal Is Not Lawful Good
by Werlin, Nancy
OLDER FICTION

Home Is Not a Country
by Elhillo, Safia
OLDER FICTION

All Our Hidden Gifts
by O'Donoghue, Caroline
More

Get connected. Join our global community of more than 200,000 librarians and educators.

This coverage is free for all visitors. Your support makes this possible.

We are currently offering this content for free. Sign up now to activate your personal profile, where you can save articles for future viewing.

ALREADY A SUBSCRIBER?