From Russia With Love...

The Impossible Journey
Gloria Whelan

This author's talent to write in the young adult female voice is apparent once again. This time, the protagonist lives in Russia, in the 1930's. After their parents disappear, it is up to Marya and her younger brother to save them from the Siberia.

Here is some of what School Library Journal has to say: "A story of a remarkable 13-year-old girl in an extraordinary situation. In Leningrad, in 1934, Marya sets out to find her parents, former aristocrats and therefore considered enemies of the state, who have been sent to Siberia as political prisoners. The spirited and resourceful girl learns that her mother is in Dudinka, a thousand miles from the closest railway station. Marya obtains a few rubles selling her paintings (like Kobe in Homeless Bird [HarperCollins, 2000], Marya's creativity helps sustain her) and buys tickets for herself and her younger brother."


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From Russia to the US...



Letters from Rifka
Karen Hesse

Rifka, a Jewish girl from Russia, is "strong-hearted and determined" as she travels from Europe across the Atlantic Ocean in the early 20th century, to Ellis Island where she is detained. Here she puts her experiences into letter form to her cousin, and to the reader.

From Publishers Weekly
"Twelve-year-old Rifka's journey from a Jewish community in the Ukraine to Ellis Island is anything but smooth sailing. Modeled on the author's great-aunt, Rifka surmounts one obstacle after another in this riveting novel. First she outwits a band of Russian soldiers, enabling her family to escape to Poland. There the family is struck with typhus. Everyone recovers, but Rifka catches ringworm on the next stage of the journey--and is denied passage to America ("If the child arrives . . . with this disease," explains the steamship's doctor, "the Americans will turn her around and send her right back to Poland"). Rifka's family must leave without her, and she is billeted in Belgium for an agreeable if lengthy recovery. Further trials, including a deadly storm at sea and a quarantine, do not faze this resourceful girl. Told in the form of "letters" written by Rifka in the margins of a volume of Pushkin's verse and addressed to a Russian relative, Hesse's vivacious tale colorfully and convincingly refreshes the immigrant experience."

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