A review by jasonfurman
Breaking Stalin's Nose by Eugene Yelchin

4.0

My ten-year old son was assigned this for summer reading and being a bit of a sucker for novel's set in Stalin's time I read it too. It was certainly written at a ten-year old level but managed to show but not tell how someone could be completely awed by Stalin but then fall out of it, in this case when the boy's father--a secret policeman--is himself taken away. The writing and pictures work well together and mixing in some references to Gogol's The Nose--which the students are reading in the book and which ends up taking a life of its own when one of them accidentally breaks of the nose of a Stalin statue--works really well. Highly recommended, especially to younger readers, as a work of literature and also as a way to learn how a slice of history affected ordinary families.