Well-crafted sentences, lively dialogue, and a remarkable story line combine for an absorbing adventure tale that young readers will find irresistible. Ivan always remembers the book of fairy tales his mother used to read to him every night, and in Pyron's simple and elegant prose, Ivan's story becomes a modern fairy tale of orphans and dark woods and children who no longer know any safe paths to follow.
When Ivan is adopted by a pack of feral dogs, he chooses to live with them instead, begging for food and sharing it with the dogs, who, in return, protect him from ruthless gangs and the harsh Russian winter. And so Ivan joins the thousands of abandoned children living on the streets of Moscow in the mid-1990s. The Soviet Union has fallen, and with it went the safety net that might have saved the desperately poor. Ivan's grandmother, Babushka Ina, died his mother has disappeared and now he has no family. "We've all lost our mothers, stupid," young Mishka Ivan Andreovich is informed by rat-faced Viktor, one of a group of homeless children subsisting in Moscow's train station. Agent: Alyssa Eisner Henkin, Trident Media Group. Though some scenes of Mishka and the dogs' trials can be a bit repetitive, their sameness underscores their unremitting and often heartbreaking battle to survive, day after day. The book's emotional impact is immense Mishka grapples with his identity as his memories of his mother gradually fade and he becomes increasingly feral. Mishka-abandoned at age five by an abusive man who lived with (and presumably killed) Mishka's mother-befriends a pack of bedraggled wild dogs together, they beg and forage for food, sleep in metro stations, ride trains to stay warm, and avoid military personnel intent on capturing them. Inspired by the real-life story of a boy who survived on the streets of Moscow in the mid-1990s, the novel exposes the plight of many homeless, orphaned Russian children after the fall of the Soviet Union.
As she did in A Dog's Way Home (2011), Pyron delivers a reflective, hard-hitting story about the bond between child and dog-in this case, seven of them.
0 kommentar(er)
