Extensive research on historical events, names, cityscapes, and living situations enriches the story, which alternates perspective among Valentina, Oksana, and Rifka, Valentina’s grandmother. By focusing her account on only the two young girls, Blankman situates the seemingly distant horror of the disaster in a firmly human context. Blankman spins a stunningly complex tale out of simple words. Forced together by the sudden evacuation, the girls must overcome both their hatred of each other and the grief heaped upon them by the accident as they forge a new life in Leningrad with Valentina’s estranged grandmother, who harbors a dangerous secret. 4 has exploded, killing several workers and sending the rest en masse to the hospital, poisoned by the very air they breathe. Their fathers, night-shift plant workers at the Chernobyl power station, have not yet come home. Fifth grade classmates and rivals Valentina Kaplan and Oksana Savchenko, however, are worried. So when the morning of April 26, 1986, dawns red, with “unearthly blue” smoke billowing into the air, life proceeds as normal. The citizens of the town of Pripyat, Ukraine, have always been assured that “an accident at a nuclear power station was a statistical impossibility.”
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