Hope's War

Dave Jenkinson is a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba and the author of the “Portraits” section of Emergency Librarian.

With her first young-adult novel, The Hunger (1999), Skrypuch
demonstrated her ability to write hard-hitting fiction. Hope’s War is
even more powerful as five members of the extended Baliuk family who
live in Mississauga, Ontario, find all aspects of their lives upended
when one of them, 78-year-old Danylo Feschuk, is threatened with loss of
his Canadian citizenship for having committed war crimes.

Danylo and his wife Nadiya (Hope in English) had immigrated to Canada
as Displaced Persons following World War II. Recently widowed, Danylo is
temporarily living with his daughter Orysia, son-in-law, Walt, and their
adolescent daughters, Kat and Genya, when RCMP officers question him
about his wartime activities in Ukraine. Shortly thereafter, Danylo is
officially accused of having lied during the immigration process by
failing to divulge his collaboration with the Germans by
“participating in atrocities against the civilian population during
the period 1943–1944, as an auxiliary policeman in German-occupied
Ukraine.” Because Danylo faces not a criminal but a deportation trial,
the onus is on him to prove he did not lie.

Told from a number of perspectives, Hope’s War features Kat as the
central teen character, someone who was already experiencing her own
problems as the “new kid” in an all-arts high school. While the
events in Kat’s life are interesting and are used, to some extent, by
Skrypuch to echo aspects of what is happening to Danylo, the deportation
trial and Danylo’s memories of what really occurred in Ukraine are
what will grab readers emotionally and not let them go, even at the
book’s surprising conclusion. Highly recommended.