Book review - Under the Broken Sky

Title: Under the Broken Sky
Author: Mariko Nagai
Genre: historical fiction/verse novel
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Rating:

lovely insight into a little recognized perspective

Summary (provided by publisher): Twelve-year-old Natsu and her family live a quiet farm life in Manchuria, near the border of the Soviet Union. But the life they’ve known begins to unravel when her father is recruited to the Japanese army, and Natsu and her little sister, Cricket, are left orphaned and destitute.
In a desperate move to keep her sister alive, Natsu sells Cricket to a Russian family following the 1945 Soviet occupation. The journey to redemption for Natsu's broken family is rife with struggles, but Natsu is tenacious and will stop at nothing to get her little sister back.
Literary and historically insightful, this is one of the great untold stories of WWII. Much like the Newbery Honor book Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai, Mariko Nagai's Under the Broken Sky is powerful, poignant, and ultimately hopeful.

My opinion: We tend to get a lot of books about WWII, usually about persecution in Europe or resistance groups in Germany or France. Seldom to we read about other people whose lives were entirely changed by the war. We don't get regular citizens just trying to live in Germany or Japan, people who are loyal to their government. Good citizens, not committing atrocities, caught up in something larger than them. In this case we have Japanese citizens in China, children who have lived their entire lives in this occupied territory, suddenly in terrible dangers as Japan begins to lose the war. Children who are essentially on a death march. It's much like the stories we read of Jews fleeing Europe, walking through the night, sick and starving. And that's what makes it important. This is not a story about ideologies but about the general horrors of war, of being stripped of dignity and humanity. This could be used to great affect as a supplementary text.
Advanced Reader Copy provided by NetGalley