Traitor: A Novel of World War II

This riveting WWII novel starts with a literal bang when Anatoliy “Tolya” Korolenko, a half-Polish, half-Ukrainian 17-year-old orphan, shoots and kills an officer in his own division of the Soviet Red Army. This rash act puts Tolya in the path of Solovey, the nom de guerre of Aleksey Kobryn, leader of a Ukrainian paramilitary squad called UPA (Ukrainska Povstanska Armiia). McCrina (Blood Oath) illuminates the recent history of Galicia, a much-fought-over region claimed by both Poles and Ukrainians and occupied alternately by Germans and Russians in the mid-20th century. Crisp writing plunges readers into a brutal world rife with deception, betrayal (including scenes of torture), and occasional glints of compassion. Tolya’s tale, relayed in the third person, takes place in 1944, while Aleksey’s first-person narrative starts in 1941, when the then-19-year-old attempts to rescue his father, a Ukrainian nationalist leader, from prison. To dig much deeper into specifics would detract from the pleasure of this novel’s hairpin twists, which begin early and continue to the final pages. An intricate depiction of a region whose complex history is likely to be unfamiliar to many in the United States. Ages 12–up. [em]Agent: Jennie Kendrick, Red Fox Literary. (Aug.) [/em]