Pickhart’s kaleidoscopic novel is centered in Ukraine’s 2013-14 unrest but reaches back through the Soviet era and, most important, to the region’s ancient Kobzari: the itinerant bards who sang to the accompaniment of the single-stringed bandura. Though these “powerful, dangerous” musician/storytellers were all but wiped out under Stalin, Pickhart’s passionate writing shows that their spirit remains indomitable—a living presence for her own tensile, lyrical prose and multi-layered plot lines and for the Maidan protestors, four of whom she brings to vivid life. As she follows a young feminist activist, an American doctor of Ukrainian descent, a former miner who lost half his family to the Chernobyl explosion, and the cryptic pianist who plays for the demonstrators, she pays tribute to a strong, proud people who never lose faith in their homeland, however many times “Kyiv has fallen asleep in peace and woken up in war.”
