I started reading this book because I am doing research on my next novel about Ukraine during this period but was soon caught up in the story. Mak writes with authority from her own experiences as a student in Ukraine during the Holodomor (Stalin's orchestrated famine which killed millions). Her hero is a fifteen-year-old orphaned boy who is struggling to survive in the capital of the Ukraine that is being inundated with other victims of starvation tactics. I learned not only the truths of the situation he faced but finished with the message that humans can survive by caring for one another and by stoutly standing against tyranny. It is a tale well told and by adding faces to this tragedy, much more interesting than a history book.