Escape from Stalingrad

Marino, Andy. Escape from Stalingrad
September 5, 2023 by Scholastic Inc. (In paperback)

E ARC provided by Edelweiss Plus

Artem's family has had a difficult time. When he was very young, his father was sent away to Siberia, and  his mother has had to raise him and his brother Visily by herself in Stalingrad. Artem is very interested in animals and birds, and hopes to one day be a vet. In 1942, things get worse. Vasily is called up to fight for the Red Army at the same time that the entire family recieves orders to work in construction, and the bureaucracy is not set up to take into account that the brother is in the army. They manage to escape punishment, but work is punishing enough. A young girl, Yuna, befriends Artem's mother, who tells her not to talk to Artem and to distract him, since he daydreams about animals he sees enough. It turns out that Yuna is not only an orphan, but she is Jewish as well. When the Germans attack Stalingrad, Artem's mother is badly injured. Holed up and trying to survive, Artem bargains with a sympathetic German officer for food and medical equipment. For a while, he and Yuna fill German canteens with water, but Yuna is captured by the Germans. Artem is offered even more perks if he will throw a grenade at a supply boat, but he doesn't want to. While Artem has been trying to take care of his mother, he feels that he can't leave Yuna as a prisoner. With the help of a local black marketeer who knew his father, Artem manages to bargain canned goods for her transport out of Stalingrad. He also manages to get into the German camp and escape with Yuna after setting a fire. As the battle rages on, Artem works protecting a factory by looking out for planes, but when an officer lets him know that he is worth more to the Russians dead than alive, he realizes that he and Yuna must also escape and try to find his mother. Will they be able to make it out of the devastation?

Strengths: Like this author's Escape from Chernobyl and The Plot to Kill Hitler, Escape from Stalingrad is a well-researched, swiftly moving snapshot of a particular and horrible moment in history. Artem's interest in animals gives a good grounding in life before the war, but a telling scene where he expxlains to an officer that his interest in animals is really for the good of the motherland shows clearly how internalized the oppression he lived under was. There's a good note by Marino about the source works he consulted in order to write this, and some of my really avid readers might hunt down those titles. Yuna's Jewish background is clearly an issue, but I enjoyed the fact that it didn't really matter to Artem or his mother, and that the three of them came together as a family once they escaped. Given the vast devastation of the war, I imagine that there were many, many makeshift families. The details about the housing and food situation will appeal to readers who like the survival aspect of war stories, but there are enough details of shelling and sniping to appeal to those who prefer combat scenes. What I liked best was the great description of a young person who ended up in an impossible situation and tried desperately to make the best of it. The really brilliant part is that neither the Russians nor the Germans came across as completely evil. There were characters from both backgrounds who were more or less evil depending on their circumstances, and this seems to me to be very true to life. Hand this to readers who have read all of Tarshis' I Survived books and are looking for something with a bit more depth. 
Weaknesses: Scholastic has a bad habit of issuing all of the titles that I really like and would be wildly popular in my library in paperback. I get it. Publishing is about making money. But are there no lovers of sports books, war books, and romances that would buy these in hardcover? And do that many people buy hugely long fantasy series in that format? It seems like I am always needing new WWII books, but a prebind will hold up maybe ten years. Then, no matter what the binding is like, the pages turn to dust.
What I really think: I will definitely be purchasing a prebind copy, and hope that Marino will continue to find aspects of young people dealing with different disasters to write about. I love to give these to children who complain about things like not being allowed to use their cell phones in the hallways! Perspective can be a sobering thing.