CROW STONE

A young woman survives a brutal post–World War II work camp in this title that continues the series that began with 2015’s Red Stone and is loosely based on Goldstone’s mother’s experiences.

The book opens with Katya’s younger brother Albert’s brief furlough home to Königsberg for his 24th birthday. It’s November 1944, and Albert’s a Wehrmacht soldier. While the official word at the munitions factory where Katya works is that victory is near, Albert knows the Germans are losing. Katya, Albert, and their sisters are kulak orphans, ethnic German refugees from Stalin’s USSR. When the Soviet army invades East Prussia a few months later, Katya flees only to be captured and sent with other German women to a work camp in the Ural Mountains where her fluency in Russian means she’s forced to translate for her captors in addition to enduring backbreaking work, near starvation, and typhus. When Katya kills and eats one of the crows that haunt the camp, she finds a source of hope that may help her survive. Goldstone paints the horrors of war vividly and comprehensively; neither the Germans nor the Russians are the good guys. Katya, treated brutally by both sides, doesn’t seem to hold to any political ideology, although she challenges Nazi belief in Aryan superiority. The number of times Katya encounters people from her past strains credulity but not to a breaking point.

Difficult, harsh, and worthy of attention.