The Raven's Children

The horror of the knock on the door by the Secret Police and the fear of living under such a regime is something thankfully unknown to children in the west, unless they are refugees from such horror.  But to Shura and Tanya, living in Leningrad under Stalin, this is a real happening when first their father and then their mother and small baby brother are taken away and they become non-people, invisible to all around them who just want them to go away and not disturb their lives.  At first the children, seven and nine years old enjoy spending the money their mother has left them, but then the reality hits when they return to find someone else living in their small apartment.  On the run now they start talking to birds in the hope they will help find the Raven, the name coming from something overheard.  They become separated and eventually Shura finds himself in an orphanage where everything is grey and everyone looks the same.  He escapes finding himself invisible, but eventually rescues his baby brother and finds Tanya and Aunt Vera and safety.

This starts off as a straightforward story of two children in an impossible situation in Soviet Russia, but the reality of the system under which they live is brought to the reader by the eyes that watch Shura, the ears that come out of the wall, and the fact that he is invisible to passers- by.  This claustrophobic feel enfolds the reader and becomes quite sinister as it is obviously meant to be, making one feel a non-person.  The tragedy of Lena whose husband has been given ten years and who decides to wait for him in the same apartment so that he will find her, the caretaker and his wife invisible too, all bring the nature of lives under this regime to life.

This is a chilling story, not for every child and maybe for an older readership than 10-14, but I think it will need introducing to readers who may well in time go on to read Solzenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovic to learn more.