Every single story is so well written and fleshed out! Valery did a great job of showing the human cost of this war and bringing awareness to what refugees are having to go through to get to safety. It is a heartbreak but important read.

This book serves largely as a document of the confusion faced by Ukrainians after Russia's arbitrary invasion in 2022. First and foremost, I respect the amount of work the author did to uncover and document many different perspectives. However, because there were so many different people interviewed the narrative feels loose. It compares unfavorably to a book like "Syria's Secret Library: Reading and Redemption in a Town Under Siege" where the narrative is bound together around a single library, appealing to general readers. This is a useful eyewitness book but I can't really recommend it to a general audience.