Description

A prequel story by a Belarusian author about a teenage girl whose life is a maelstrom of talent, illness, love and surrounding events. A tight knot of emotions that will eventually turn into strength.

Sonia is fifteen.
She is finishing ninth grade. Around her are adult problems that a teenager cannot solve, and inside are the consequences of childhood trauma.

The relationship with her mother is more or less the same, although she used to post photos of her daughter with quotes from her childhood on her blog. With the father, it’s complicated.

Her best friend Ksiuša can endlessly rewatch the same video for her, as well as retell particularly difficult news, but even she can not protect Sonia from herself.

And then there’s Paša…

“The action of the story takes place in a completely topical time – the 2010s in Minsk up to the time of the pandemic and ends with the protests of 2020. The strict chronology is neatly broken up by leaps into the recent past, which is the most natural childhood for the teenage protagonist, but the plot moves quite colorfully precisely at the expense of modern methods. Communication via messengers, descriptions of likes, gifs, emoji and the anticipation of the message itself sometimes create the plot of quite a large portion of the text. Mixed with the “traditional” narrative, they give the effect of constant presence with the very Sonia, who, by the way, is rarely called by name. There is a lot of pain in the text – certainly there should be when the narrator is struggling with illness or the wave of surrounding violence that engulfed her in August 2020. At the same time, there is sad irony, humor, light banter, and laughter through tears, which certainly adds credibility when reading the book from beginning to end.” – reviewed by Cichan Čarniakievič.