Review: The Silence of Trees by Valya Dudycz Lupescu

One of the 5-point categories in the Summer Book Challenge is to "read a book chosen based on its cover."  While surfing Amazon.com for cheap or new books, I found The Silence of Trees by Valya Dudycz Lupescu, for 99 cents.  I was very intrigued by the cover of the book, which features a pysanka, a Russian painted egg.  I once painted pysanka in a high school art class (although my mom accidentally dropped and destroyed mine).  So it worked out perfectly for filling that category in the SuBC.

The Silence of Trees' heroine, Nadya, is sixteen years old when a Gypsy fortune-teller warns her that she will have to leave behind great sadness and pain to reach her destiny.  Returning home that night, she finds her home burned and her entire family gone -- victims of the German army, which has come to Ukraine in the Soviet invasion during World War II.  Nadya flees for her life with her sweetheart, Stephan, but tragedy separates the two of them, and Nadya makes the decision to continue on with her life and try to find happiness in her survival.  Fifty years later, Nadya is living in Chicago, Illinois with her husband, surrounded by children and grandchildren.  She appears to have a happy life, but she is still haunted by what she left behind in Ukraine, and the ghosts of her unhappy past, which she has never revealed to anyone in her family.  Spurred on by their whispers, Nadya begins to tell the tales of her life in the Ukraine, hoping that by letting go of the past, she will be able to finally move into the future.

I have mixed feelings about this book.  While I loved the history (the German invasion of the Soviet Union) and the traditions that Nadya tried to hard to keep alive with her family, I felt that the story jumped around a lot.  This might have been more a technical issue with the book (it was downloaded onto my Kindle, and I have found that sometimes there are typos or issues with spacing in Kindle books).  There weren't larger spaces between Nadya's memories and her real, present-day life, which could get confusing at times, especially since several of her children were named after people she had met when she lived in Ukraine.  Without the obvious change in font or space, it would be confusing for several lines before I would realize where and when that part of the story was taking place.  Nadya's memories and stories were much more interesting to me than her present-day life in Chicago -- which I suppose is to be expected, considering that in Chicago she was an old woman with a very peaceful life, so different from her violent past in Ukraine.  It also dragged a little bit in parts.  This book was short (only 312 pages) but it took me almost five days to read.  

I would recommend it to someone who really likes Soviet history, or Russian folklore, and who likes exploring the emotions of their main character.  That's really the majority of this book.

Rating: ***