THREE COLORS OF COURAGE

In Hutchison’s novel, a young Romanian woman finds renewed strength as her country’s regime unravels.

How is it possible to reclaim one’s humanity in a country with hidden microphones, informers, and secret police everywhere? This is the problem that 17-year-old Adriana Nicu and her best friend, Gabriela Martinescu, face in the final installment of the author’s Cold War trilogy, set during the final unwinding of Romanian president Nicolae Ceauşescu’s iron-fisted rule. The novel opens in September 1989, with the collapse of Communism in Poland—an event that bodes ill for an authoritarian regime that’s reeling from shortages of basic food items. For a time, Adriana finds solace in her studies, and in reading forbidden books by British and American authors. She draws particularly deep inspiration from Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) and its story of a determined attorney’s attempt to seek justice for a Black man: “We need courageous people who will stand up to injustice,” says Adriana’s cousin. “Like the lawyer in that book.” However, as dissent sweeps the Eastern Bloc, it’s unclear whether Adriana and her newfound friends from Students for a Free Romania will ever find an outlet for their frustrations—until events on the ground, such as the abrupt disappearance of a dear old friend working on a building project, begin to suggest otherwise. Over the course of this novel, Hutchison delivers a skillfully crafted narrative that is by turns comic and caustic; its main characters’ fortunes effectively zigzag between triumph to terror, which captures the arbitrary nature of authoritarian regimes everywhere. Also, as antidemocratic extremism gains ground in various places in the real world, this novel will remind readers of the power of resilience, and its ability to flip even the bleakest of political scripts: “They didn’t have anything real, like weapons. Only abstract things, like hope.”

An unsettling evocation of Cold War–era repression, whose legacy seems timelier than ever.