Book Review: The Silence that Remains by Meg Wingerter

Genre(s): Historical Fiction

Book Synopsis:

The famine that decimated Annushka’s village officially never happened. Since she was a child, she’s kept quiet about what she saw in an implicit bargain with the Soviet regime: behave, and you might live to see your parents again.

She survives by keeping her head down and cultivating the image of a loyal, if not terribly bright, citizen. When the Nazi invasion of Ukraine forces her to flee east, however, she meets people as disillusioned as herself: Diana, a former ballerina pressed into serving as a concubine for a powerful man; and Viktor, a haunted veteran returning from imprisonment in a labor camp. With them, she finally feels free to speak the truth.

But this is Stalin’s Russia, and anyone can betray her.

Review:

The Silence that Remains follows the lives of three different people: Diana, born to Russian parents during the reign of the last Tsar, and raised in France as a ballerina; Viktor, a career soldier and veteran of the first World War; and Annushka, a girl from the Ukraine who has known life only under the Soviet regime.

Some passages take the form of journal entries, others read more like a typical first-person narrative, and still others are letters. No matter which character is being followed at the time, it’s clear at the start of every chapter whose viewpoint it is.

If you know anything about Soviet Russia under Lennin or Stalin, you know things were bleak for people living there, and associating with the wrong person could get you permanently silenced or imprisoned. This book takes a look at that through the eyes of all three characters, and it pulls no punches. There are some ugly events that take place (and while the author didn’t make them terribly explicit, the implied nature is certainly there. There are several SA’s that take place, along with all the horrors you’d expect from battle/war, or the Russian labor camps of that era. I’m mentioning it so readers are aware before picking it up. I know those topics aren’t for everyone.)

I found this to be an engaging read. It doesn’t focus heavily on the history (though that’s certainly part of it), but rather the characters navigating life during that time period. I personally love character-driven stories, and I enjoyed this one.

Author website: Meg Wingerter is a reporter for the Denver Post, but I couldn’t locate a personal website through searching.