#BookReview #BlogTour The Soldier’s Child by Tetyana Denford @bookouture

Posted on by whatcathyreadnext

Welcome to today’s stop on the blog tour for The Soldier’s Child by Tetyana Denford. My thanks to Jess at Bookouture for inviting me to take part in the tour and for my digital review copy via NetGalley. Do check out the posts by my tour buddies for today, Robin at Robin Loves Reading, Emma at Shaz’s Book Blog and Julia at Christian Bookaholic.

About the Book

“He is mine, he is ours,” she whispers, as the tears in her eyes gather in the corners. She holds her baby tightly, her breath coming out in ragged gasps, knowing that she needs to give her child to her brother forever. But will she ever be able to tell her child the truth about who his real mother is?

Ukraine, 1941 . War has ripped Katya ’s country and heart in two. When two soldiers knock down her door and force her into a truck, she knows deep down that this might be the last time she ever sees home. As she is driven away to a labour camp, she looks out the tiny window at the barren winter landscape and thinks only of her son Alexander , who she was forced to leave behind and may never see again…

Decades later, Katya has tried to rebuild her life after the horrors of war, but she still clings on to the hope of being reunited with her precious son. But whilst Katya has stayed in Ukraine, little does she know that her son moved his family to America years before in search of a better life.

Can she find peace without knowing what happened to him? Will Katya ever be able to reunite with Alexander and tell the truth about who she is? Or will they be defeated by the war that has already taken so much from them?

Format: eARC (350 pages) Publisher: Bookouture
Publication date: 10th July 2023 Genre: Historical Fiction

Find The Soldier’s Child on Goodreads

Purchase links 
Hive | Amazon UK 
Links provided for convenience only, not as part of an affiliate programme

My Review

The Soldier’s Child is an incredibly emotional and dramatic story which although a work of fiction is based partly on events in the author’s own family. The story is narrated from two main points of view – Katya, and her son, Alexander (the soldier’s child of the title). However, at certain points we also witness events from the perspective of Sasha (the soldier of the title) and Alexander’s son, Evgen.

Although a lot of the events take place during WW2 and focus on the dreadful experiences of the people of Ukraine during that period, the action of the book spans six decades, from 1918 to the 1980s. The story moves back and forth in time and personally I would have found it helpful if all not just some of the chapter headings had shown a date. The inclusion of a family tree was incredibly useful for helping me keep track of characters and their relationships. The book does include some words in Ukrainian and Russian so be prepared to refer to your favourite search engine if they’re unfamiliar to you.

Most stories need a villain and in this case it’s a female character whose destructive actions result in Katya being parted from the man she loves and, later, from her son Alexander, in the process changing the course of Katya’s life.

The standout sections of the book for me were those describing Katya’s terrible experiences in Vorkuta, a Soviet labour camp where she is put to work in a gold mine alongside others who have fallen foul of Stalin’s regime. As well as gruelling work often with no tools but her hands, the extreme cold of Siberian winters and a near starvation diet, the possibility of death for a minor misdemeanour or on the whim of a guard is everpresent. The resilience needed to survive this is unimaginable.

The Soldier’s Child is a story of the cruelty of war, of displacement and forced separation from loved ones. And the sad thing is that Ukrainians are once again suffering at the hands of an invader who has no regard for human life. However, it’s also a story of courage, hope and resilience. And we see that again today in Ukraine.

In three words: Emotional, dramatic, moving

Try something similar: The Lace Weaver by Lauren Chater

About the Author

Tetyana Denford grew up in a small town in New York, and is a Ukrainian-American author, translator, and freelance writer. She grew up with her Ukrainian heritage at the forefront of her childhood, and it led to her being fascinated with how storytellers in various cultures passed down their lives to future generations; life stories are where we learn about ourselves, each other, and are the things that matter most, in a world where things move so quickly.

Connect with Tetyana
Website | Twitter | Instagram

7 thoughts on “#BookReview #BlogTour The Soldier’s Child by Tetyana Denford @bookouture”

    1. There were lots of timeline issues in it. However it was an uncorrected proof I was reading so I gave it the benefit of the doubt. I did feed back some examples to the publisher but basically the dates and ages of the characters were all over the place and there were some factual errors like the date of the Battle of Stalingrad.

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      1. Ah… this doesn’t bode well for it at all. I get pretty persnickety about blatant factual errors, and things that make no sense. I know, “literary license” but some facts just shouldn’t be messed with, unless it is supposed to be an alternative reality universe. And that’s a genre I don’t read. Thanks!

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      3. This sometimes happens with fictional books people write about their own families. Like, they must know better than an editor. (For example, during WWII, Ukrainians didn’t think of themselves as that, they were Soviets. That Hitler invaded the part of the USSR that was Ukraine did make a difference regarding the fighting. Kate Quinn shows that perfectly in her book The Diamond Eye.)

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