Hope's War

Rating:
Summary: truth
Review: at last some truth is published, pain is documented. we need more documentation about the tragedies endured by Ukrainians and the unspeakable crimes perpetrated onto them. we need books for adolscents for Communist genocide curriculums

Rating:
Summary: A Must-Read for Teens
Review: Hope's War is a wonderful story set in two worlds, decades apart. Kat Baliuk is off to a new school, where she tries to find her place as a new student while pursuing her passion for art. Kat's grandfather, an immigrant to Canada from the Ukraine is faced with a struggle of his own. He is accused of war crimes in a concentration camp during World War Two. Marsha Skrypuch skillfully weaves these two stories together to create a compelling portrait of one Canadian family. While addressing troubling historical issues, Marsha Skrypuch also creates compelling contemporary characters with very modern problems. Kat learns both from her new friend Ian and from her grandfather that appearances can be decieving and that the world can be a very complicated place. Hope's War is a thoroughly well-written and thought-provoking tale.

Rating:
Summary: A Powerful Story with Building Tension
Review: Imagine this scenario if you dare: You are 15 and have transferred to a new high school. Before you can make your way through the maze of teachers, students, courses, and cliques, you learn that the police have charged your 78-year-old immigrant grandfather with war crimes. Before you can make your way through the resulting maze of new emotions, questions, public scrutiny, and hearings, you learn that the government will deport your grandfather if it makes its case. To make its case, the government need not present incontrovertible proof or even strong circumstantial evidence. Tenuous innuendo is sufficient, for all the government must do is establish a remote probability that your grandfather lied during the immigration process about his activities in his former homeland. This probability can never be verified one way or the other, for the government has destroyed all the records.

This is not another account of a Kafkaesque cold war regime or a cautionary tale about a twisted brave new world of the future. The powerful story that unfolds before teenager Kataryna (Kat) Baliuk's eyes in "Hope's War" is today's threatening reality for naturalized Canadian citizens who emigrated from Ukraine after World War II. (Naturalized U.S. citizens who emigrated from Ukraine live under a similar cloud.)

A talented art student, Kat faces challenges of her own as she begins the 10th grade at the Cawthra School for the Arts after a stormy ninth-grade year at St. Paul's Catholic School. Her new classmates, with their diverse loyalties and cliques, already know about the incident that forced her to leave St. Paul's.

Her grandfather Danylo has recently moved in with the Baliuk family after the death of his wife Nadiya (Hope). When Kat arrives home from her second day at Cawthra, she finds two RCMP officers from the department of immigration's war crimes unit interviewing Danylo about the forms he filled out 50 years ago.

Multiple story lines intertwine in "Hope's War:" Kat must discover who her true friends are as she tries to fit in at school; Danylo must force himself to revisit the horrific days of the German occupation when 2.5 million Ukrainians--600,000 of whom were Ukrainian Jews--were liquidated by the Nazi regime; the Baliuk family must pull together in the face of glaring headlines, protesters, hate mail and the impending deportation hearings to support a Danylo they may not know.

Early on, Kat sneaks into her parents' bedroom and finds the official notice from the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration: "Kat dropped the paper back on the bed as if it were dirty. What did this mean? That her beloved grandfather was a war criminal? The paper talked about atrocities committed and collaboration and thirty days to respond."

Did Danylo collaborate with the Germans occupying his Ukrainian village in 1943 and 1944? And if not, why is the RCMP claiming that he did? Author Marsha Skrypuch is in no hurry to weave together loose ends and the answers to such questions. Instead, she allows the story time to unfold naturally with grace, passion and building tension before Kat and the reader learn the truth and for whom it matters.

Rating:
Summary: A Brave Book
Review: In her previous work, Marsha Skrypuch, has shown herself to be fearless in tackling issues from which others might shy away as being too controversial. "Hope's War" is no exception. It tells the story of Kat, a young Canadian of Ukrainian heritage, whose comfortable world is turned upside down when her beloved grandfather is accused of being a war criminal, put on trial and faced with the prospect of his citizenship being revoked and of being deported. The great strength of the book is the way in which Skrypuch allows the reader to learn along with Kat as she struggles to understand her family's history, and realises that there are no simple answers. By also using flashbacks from the point of view of the grandfather as a young man, Skyrpuch very subtlely shows how everyone is shaped by the times in which they live. These interludes are particularly vivid and show just what meticulous research has gone into this powerful book.

Rating:
Summary: truth
Review: Marsha Skrypuch has produced, in Hope's War, an important and significant work. The story examines injustice and prejudice through its travel to a little-known part of history. Blending the past with current events, Hope's War is sure to be a book with which modern teens will identify.