A review by bgg616
All That Is Solid Melts into Air by Darragh McKeon

5.0

I loved this book which is probably a surprising response to a book that tells the story of the people who lived around Chernobyl at the time of the meltdown.. The story of Soviet sheer incompetence is mind boggling. This is fiction, but describes what happened to people living around the failed nuclear reactor. The oppression of the Soviet system is described in numbing detail. Yet the humanity of the characters shines through. It is a tribute to the human spirit that some survived this disaster and the Soviet regime. Readers can't help but think of the resistance to the current Russian invasion of the Ukraine, a country whose people I've met and known are fiercely nationalist. Russian history is full of tragic sagas, as is the Ukraine. The link with Ireland is that for decades the Irish have had a charity called Chernobyl Children - http://chernobyl-international.com/
Despite the dark theme, this is a hopeful book.