Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
It is the summer of 1945. The Allies have triumphed in Europe and Hitler has vanished. But with Japanese forces gathering just across the border in occupied China, brutal warfare on Russian soil remains a real and constant threat to Soviet life.
For Petka, a rambunctious twelve-year-old boy with dreams too big for his tiny village of Razgulyaevka, the prospect of invasion is dangerously thrilling. He watches the Red Army troops march off to engage the enemy, and wages his own war against boredom, bullies, and his lot in life as a bastard in a backwoods world. Secretly raising a wolf in his grandmother s goat barn, happily raising hell with the local troops, stowing away in a shipment of bootleg booze destined for the combat zone, and defying death by the noose, Petka eagerly takes all he can from life, with an irrepressible spirit.
Nominated for the 2014 Rossica Translation Prize.
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Synopsis
It is the summer of 1945. Germany has been defeated, Hitler has disappeared, and tensions are mounting ever higher along the Russian-Chinese border...where the threat of Japanese invasion haunts.
For Petka, no life could be more thrilling and glorious than marching into battle alongside the Red Army. But he is only twelve, the bastard child of a fractured family, trapped in a village too tiny for his bursting spirit. So he must make his own adventure wherever he can find it. And if that means passing off a wolf cub as a puppy under the nose of his ferocious grandma, stealing bootleg alcohol for the bivouacked troops he worships, smuggling himself in a barrel across the border and into the line of fire, fighting for his life when his own aimless peers turn inexplicably vicious, or befriending an enigmatic Japanese POW who transcends Petka's provincial world, then so be it.
By turns comical, harrowing, poignant, and exhilarating, Petka reveals the soul of a boy who knows only to take from life all that he can--not merely what his circumstances allow.
Nominated for the 2014 Rossica Translation Prize.