Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch

Through the lives of several children and their working mothers, this book shows how families keep each other in their thoughts even when they are far apart.

In 1943 ten-year-old Lida is torn away from her home in the Ukraine, separated from her little sister Larissa, and sent to a slave labor camp in Germany, but when she is moved and set to making bombs she sees a way to strike back at the Nazis.

Maria and her friend Nathan flee their Nazi-occupied Ukrainian town, hoping to earn wages and avoid starvation as foreign workers in Austria, but they are quickly separated and Maria waits out the war as a farm laborer.

Despite their political differences Nyl, a young Ukrainian farmer, and Alice, a Canadian girl whose father has come to the Soviet Union, struggle to survive the famine-genocide known as the Holodomor, when the forced collectivization of the Ukrainian farms and hard winters led to mass starvation and death.

It is 1981. In the middle of the Pacific Ocean, a fishing boat overloaded with 60 Vietnamese refugees drifts. The motor has failed; the hull is leaking; the drinking water is nearly gone. This is the dramatic true story recounted by Tuan Ho, who was six years old when he, his mother, and two sisters dodged the bullets of Vietnam's military police for the perilous chance of boarding that boat. Told to multi-award-winning author Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch...