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Crow Stone

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

The evocative story of Katya's epic winter journey through Prussia and her eventual imprisonment by the Red Army.


It's especially cold and snowy, that last winter of the Second World War. With the Red Army expected to thunder through the Third Reich at any moment, a sense of doom pervades Katya's world where everyone is expected to believe in the Nazi's final victory. At the end of January, 1945, East Prussian civilians are finally given permission to flee.


Having spent the war years working at an ammunition factory, Katya joins her two sisters, and thousands of others, trekking with overloaded wagons along crowded, snowy roads. They're trying to reach ships waiting along the Baltic coast. They don't make it. Instead, Katya's separated from her sisters and forced to take a long and shameful journey back into the Soviet Union, a country that once labelled her kulak and destroyed her family home. Katya's dragged into a labour camp deep in the Ural Mountains. Here, with her Russian language skills from childhood, she's elevated to a leadership position as a starosta. It's a position fraught with danger as she navigates the two enemy worlds. Katya learns to eat crow, to find love, and to believe in herself.

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  • Reviews

    • Kirkus

      October 15, 2022
      A young woman survives a brutal post-World War II work camp in this title that continues the series that began with 2015's Red Stone and is loosely based on Goldstone's mother's experiences. The book opens with Katya's younger brother Albert's brief furlough home to K�nigsberg for his 24th birthday. It's November 1944, and Albert's a Wehrmacht soldier. While the official word at the munitions factory where Katya works is that victory is near, Albert knows the Germans are losing. Katya, Albert, and their sisters are kulak orphans, ethnic German refugees from Stalin's USSR. When the Soviet army invades East Prussia a few months later, Katya flees only to be captured and sent with other German women to a work camp in the Ural Mountains where her fluency in Russian means she's forced to translate for her captors in addition to enduring backbreaking work, near starvation, and typhus. When Katya kills and eats one of the crows that haunt the camp, she finds a source of hope that may help her survive. Goldstone paints the horrors of war vividly and comprehensively; neither the Germans nor the Russians are the good guys. Katya, treated brutally by both sides, doesn't seem to hold to any political ideology, although she challenges Nazi belief in Aryan superiority. The number of times Katya encounters people from her past strains credulity but not to a breaking point. Difficult, harsh, and worthy of attention. (map, author's note, glossary, list of places, supplemental reading) (Historical fiction. 14-18)

      COPYRIGHT(2022) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • Booklist

      November 1, 2022
      Grades 9-12 It's the winter of 1945, and, though WWII is nearing its end, the Red Army is on its way to invade East Prussia. Katya, an orphan originally from the Soviet Union, worries about having to lose more family. As the citizens of East Prussia flee, Katya escapes with her sisters. But they become separated, and Katya is captured by the Red Army, taken back with the German women to the Soviet Union, and put in a labor camp. When the Red Army discovers she can speak Russian, Katya becomes a translator. Too Russian for Germany and too German for Russians, Katya must learn who she is and fight to survive. Like its predecessors, this third installment in Goldstone's series is based on her mother's experiences during WWII. It can stand alone, however, providing enough explanation for readers despite being a continuation of previous novels. An engaging story from the start--however, readers should be cautioned about depictions of the atrocities of war, including rape, murder, and the horrors of labor camps.

      COPYRIGHT(2022) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

Languages

  • English

Levels

  • Lexile® Measure:610
  • Text Difficulty:2-3

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