Rebecca Caudill 2023

Interest Level:  Grades 4 to 8

Book Talk

The citizens of the town of Pripyat, Ukraine, have always been assured that "an accident at a nuclear power station was a statistical impossibility." When the morning of April 26, 1986, dawns red, with "unearthly blue" smoke billowing into the air, life proceeds as normal. Fifth grade classmates and rivals Valentina Kaplan and Oksana Savchenko, however, are worried. Their fathers, night-shift plant workers at the Chernobyl power station, have not yet come home. Soon word gets out that reactor No. 4 has exploded, killing several workers and sending the rest to the hospital, poisoned by the very air they breathe. Forced together by the sudden evacuation, the girls must overcome their hatred of each other and the grief caused by the accident as they begin a new life in Leningrad with Valentina's grandmother, a stranger to Valentina, who harbors a dangerous secret.