The road of bones by Anne Fine
Corgi Books
(Age 13+) 'Only a fool cheers when the new prince rises' is a saying
not
understood by Yuri, living with his parents and grandmother at a time
when the ever increasing brutality of the government is something to be
seen with guarded eyes. But Yuri, remembering the openness of his youth
and the joy of his parents when the new leader took over after years of
living under the Czar's autocratic rule, tempts fate and is taken to a
gulag where living in appalling circumstances, he learns to guard even
his thoughts.
Told from Yuri's point of view, the reader is drawn into the world of
the camps, where people are forced to strip the dead for clothing,
where the sound of cracking lice between the fingers is a highlight of
a day, where men live and die without anyone taking notice. This brutal
world is revealed in vivid detail by Fine as she shows clearly the
result of over zealous leaders for whom the end justifies the mean.
Yuri in escaping wants to find the resistance group and join them in
overthrowing the Leadership, and so the story comes in a complete
circle, Yuri now wondering what force he can use and how far he should
go in telling the people about the new regime, and bending them to its
new ways. With his grandmother's saying ringing in his ears, the reader
is forced to ask which way he will go, and by association, how far they
would go.
Students interested in politics and history, social issues and those
looking for a good read, need look no further than this book for an
exercise in what means a leader will use in forming a new government.
The parallels to many autocratic governments are clear, but it also
raises the issue of how people can be caught up in supporting such
regimes, and it begs the question of how far to the right many of our
modern governments are going, using nationalist fervor to solve
problems peculiar to these times. Highly recommended for students who
wish to be nudged into giving some thought about what is going on
around them.
Fran Knight
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Consulting, 2007