Christian Florescu is a lover of words and language. An aspiring writer, he collects his thoughts, feelings, and poems in a tiny notebook that he hides beneath the floorboards in the closet that he calls a bedroom. The words in his notebook are dangerous in Romania in 1989. A brutal dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu, runs the country, limiting all freedoms, forcing impoverished living conditions, and turning neighbor against neighbor in an elaborate network of citizen informants. Christian despises Ceausescu and says so openly, but quietly, at home alone with his beloved grandfather, Bunu. Christian hates the world of informants, but when he is blackmailed into spying on a friend, Dan, the son of an American diplomat, in exchange for medicine for an ailing Bunu, he feels that he cannot say no. Spending more time with Dan opens Christian’s eyes to the freedoms held in other countries. Americans have fridges full of food? American teens can read or listen to anything they want? But when Christian’s access to an American magazine shows him images of other countries in the Eastern Bloc liberating themselves from Communist rule, Christian’s ideas about freedom become bigger, more exciting, and much more dangerous. Could Romania ever become liberated, free from the tyranny of Ceausescu and open to the kinds of opportunities that Christian has only ever dreamed of?
If you’ve read one of Ruta Sepetys’ books in the past, you know that she has a fantastic talent for drawing out a lesser known piece of history and researching the heck out of it to write compelling and exciting historical fiction for a YA audience. This book is no exception. The pacing is incredible. Short chapters dealing with a lot of secrets and mystery will keep you turning those pages. Though the USSR and the Communist Bloc may get touched on in school curriculum, details on Romania’s specific and somewhat unique struggle within Ceausescu’s regime are likely to be missing from curriculum or glossed over at best, so this history is sure to be new to most teens. With news of the invasion of the Ukraine and its direct assaults on the common people, we are all finding ourselves wondering about some of the history behind these far away countries that we may not know much about or begging for stories that help us understand how such atrocities can come to pass. While this book does not directly connect to Ukraine, it does make a clear connection to the history of communism in the area, the impact of a dictatorial government, and the complex history of the majority of countries that border Russia, particularly in Eastern Europe. I Must Betray You, like all of Sepetys’ novels, will have you absorbing historical knowledge along with your fiction and running off to find out more about what is represented in the book when you’ve finished reading. I highly recommend this book!
If you’ve read one of Ruta Sepetys’ books in the past, you know that she has a fantastic talent for drawing out a lesser known piece of history and researching the heck out of it to write compelling and exciting historical fiction for a YA audience. This book is no exception. The pacing is incredible. Short chapters dealing with a lot of secrets and mystery will keep you turning those pages. Though the USSR and the Communist Bloc may get touched on in school curriculum, details on Romania’s specific and somewhat unique struggle within Ceausescu’s regime are likely to be missing from curriculum or glossed over at best, so this history is sure to be new to most teens. With news of the invasion of the Ukraine and its direct assaults on the common people, we are all finding ourselves wondering about some of the history behind these far away countries that we may not know much about or begging for stories that help us understand how such atrocities can come to pass. While this book does not directly connect to Ukraine, it does make a clear connection to the history of communism in the area, the impact of a dictatorial government, and the complex history of the majority of countries that border Russia, particularly in Eastern Europe. I Must Betray You, like all of Sepetys’ novels, will have you absorbing historical knowledge along with your fiction and running off to find out more about what is represented in the book when you’ve finished reading. I highly recommend this book!