This novel provides a biosketch of the City of St. Petersburg in Russia, then Leningrad, during and shortly after World War II. During the Siege of Leningrad, at least one million people died of disease, starvation, and the effects of war. Soviet propaganda has consistently framed the Siege as heroic resistance to Fascism, which has encouraged most accounts to emphasize the strength and resilience of the Russian people, and not the accounts of their great suffering The truth regarding actual conditions in this City cannot be easily conveyed, but this novel cuts through to the essence of the events. Survivors of the Siege, who have read the book in the original Russian, have expressed the opinion that is the best account of the Siege they have ever read.
The novel describes different aspects of survival and non-survival during the Siege. A child narrator, whose early vocabulary includes words such as bombyoshka (bombing), relates the events in several chapters. The childs frank appraisal allows the reader to penetrate to the very core of reality in a city where bombs are falling, dead bodies line the streets, and simple joys still exist in a narrow context. Each additional chapter reveals one more perspective.
