‘Perseverance, grit and sheer pluckiness’ Sherry reviews #HistoricalFiction Sunflowers Under Fire by @DianaStevan, for Rosie’s #Bookreview Team #RBRT

Today’s team review is from Sherry. She blogs here https://sherryfowlerchancellor.com/

Sherry has been reading Sunflowers Under Fire by Diana Stevan

Perseverance, grit and sheer pluckiness describe the heroine of this fictionalized story about the life of the author’s grandmother. What a lady she was. From the opening sequence when she gave birth by herself on the kitchen floor, got up and cooked for her husband who just joined the army and then walked the food a number of miles while half a day post-partum, to her bravery when she decided to move her family to an unknown land where they didn’t know the language, Lukia is someone to admire. She was an amazing human being and the author captured the spirit of this lady in a way that made this reader relate to her (even though I’ve never been faced with anything like the situations Lukia faced).

The heroine handled herself well and kept her family fed and with shelter in all kinds of adversity. The losses she suffered were horrible, but she didn’t let them daunt her or cause her to lose her faith.

I very much enjoyed reading this book even though it was dismal and heartbreaking in parts. My admiration of Lukia grew throughout the book. She was just not going to sit down and take it when life didn’t go her way.  If you like tales of fortitude and overcoming tribulation, I recommend this one highly.

4.5 stars

In this family saga and Great War story, love and loss are bound together by a country always at war. A heartbreakingly intimate novel about one courageous woman.

In 1915, Lukia Mazurets, a Ukrainian farmwife, delivers her eighth child while her husband is serving in the Tsar’s army. Soon after, she and her children are forced to flee the invading Germans. Over the next fourteen years, Lukia must rely on her wits and faith to survive life in a refugee camp, the ravages of a typhus epidemic, the Bolshevik revolution, unimaginable losses, and one daughter’s forbidden love.

Based on the true stories of her grandmother’s ordeals, author Diana Stevan captures the voices of those who had little say in a country that is still being fought over.

AmazonUK | AmazonUS

Set in early 20th Century Ukraine, @TerryTyler4 reviews #HistoricalFiction Sunflowers Under Fire by @DianaStevan, for Rosie’s #Bookreview Team #RBRT

Today’s team review is from Terry. She blogs here https://terrytylerbookreviews.blogspot.com/

Terry has been reading Sunflowers Under Fire by Diana Stevans

Even before I began to read this, I was so impressed by what Diana Stevan has done – this is the first part of a partially fictionalised biography of her grandmother, Lukia Mazurets, who Stevan knew as a young child.  In the notes at the back, she writes that her mother told her the story of their lives, and she pieced the rest together by extensive research of the history of that place and time.  The research is evident throughout, without seeming intrusive; the customs and daily toils of such resilient peoples’ lives were fascinating to read about.  Also most interesting was the effect of the political situation, from WW1 to 1929, and how little the peasants actually knew; all news about events elsewhere in the country came via word of mouth.  Aside from this, the nature of Lukia’s incredibly hard life, with so much tragedy, meant that events happening thousands of miles away were not her immediate concern. 
The novel begins in 1915, with her husband going off to fight for the Tsar just as Lukia has given birth to a sixth child – Stevan’s mother.  The story is simply written, very readable, and I flew through the first half.  During the last third, I sometimes felt that events were whizzed through too fast, and the storytelling became a little too simplistic, as if she was racing to the end. Now and again I would have liked a little more depth and detail, and did consider that there might be an excess of material for one novel.  

In itself this is a marvellous book to have written, and I imagine it is greatly treasured by Stevan’s family, but it also stands up as a commendable piece of historical fiction about the lives of the common people of a country about which I knew little.  I have the sequel, and look forward to finding out what happens next.

In this family saga and Great War story, love and loss are bound together by a country always at war. A heartbreakingly intimate novel about one courageous woman.

In 1915, Lukia Mazurets, a Ukrainian farmwife, delivers her eighth child while her husband is serving in the Tsar’s army. Soon after, she and her children are forced to flee the invading Germans. Over the next fourteen years, Lukia must rely on her wits and faith to survive life in a refugee camp, the ravages of a typhus epidemic, the Bolshevik revolution, unimaginable losses, and one daughter’s forbidden love.

Based on the true stories of her grandmother’s ordeals, author Diana Stevan captures the voices of those who had little say in a country that is still being fought over.

AmazonUK | AmazonUS

Finding Strength To Carry On. @deBieJennifer Reviews #Histfic Sunflowers Under Fire by @DianaStevan

Today’s team review is from Jenni. She blogs here https://jenniferdebie.com/

Jenni has been reading Sunflowers Under Fire by Diana Stevan

There is a line in Barbra Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible that ran circles between my ears with every page turn while I read Diana Stevan’s Sunflowers Under Fire. The line goes:

“I knew Rome was burning, but I had just enough water to scrub the floor, so I did what I could.” (Kingsolver, 383).

It’s a commentary on the way women, mothers, carry on as countries crumble, revolutions flare and fade, as terrible things both great and small happen around and to them— women carry on because there are children who need feeding and fields that need plowing and traditions that must be observed because to be without tradition is to live without history, and that seems to be the message of Stevan’s stunning novel.

Sunflowers Under Fire opens on a birth scene in the summer of 1915, a woman alone on the floor of her family home gasping against the rag she has gagged herself with as she pushes her daughter, the last of many children, out of her body and into the world. Still alone this woman, Lukia Mazurets of Kivertsi, Ukraine, cuts the umbilical cord, cleans her child and herself, and goes back to the kitchen to make dinner.

This one scene sets the tone for the entire novel.

In the next pages, Lukia will learn that her husband has enlisted in the Tsar’s army to fight what we now call WWI, a few pages after that she and her five living children, including the days-old baby girl, will be herded onto a train and taken to a refugee camp in the Caucasus mountains. After the war, they return home to their farm where nothing remains but the dirt and the clay oven, which couldn’t burn when the farmhouse was torched. Even their well has been poisoned, and still Lukia carries on.

Across tragedy and hardship, and great joys also, Lukia maintains her faith and her traditions and her love for her home and always carries on. As Ukraine burns around her, metaphorically and literally, she scrubs the floors and bakes the bread and clothes her children because that is what a mother does. When she cannot fight the whole world, she fights for her corner of it instead.

It is a testament to Lukia’s resolve, and the love that went into chronicling her life. If you read the author’s afterword, you find that Lukia was Diana Stevan’s grandmother, and Stevan’s mother was the baby girl, Eudokia, born on the floor in the first pages. Lukia was a real person, not a character invented for our entertainment, and with every sentence she feels as warm and as nourishing as bread she bakes constantly across the course of Sunflowers.

Beautiful and harrowing, Sunflowers Under Fire is a novel about loss, love, and a mother’s resolve to carry on in the face of unimaginable odds. It is stunning work from a master storyteller, and a novel I look forward to returning to again and again.

5/5

In this family saga and Great War story, love and loss are bound together by a country always at war. A heartbreakingly intimate novel about one courageous woman.

In 1915, Lukia Mazurets, a Ukrainian farmwife, delivers her eighth child while her husband is serving in the Tsar’s army. Soon after, she and her children are forced to flee the invading Germans. Over the next fourteen years, Lukia must rely on her wits and faith to survive life in a refugee camp, the ravages of a typhus epidemic, the Bolshevik revolution, unimaginable losses, and one daughter’s forbidden love.

Based on the true stories of her grandmother’s ordeals, author Diana Stevan captures the voices of those who had little say in a country that is still being fought over. Readers who’ve enjoyed Kristin Hannah’s novel The Nightingale have bought this book.

AmazonUK | AmazonUS