The Impossible Journey

Publishers Weekly

This sequel to Angel on the Square, set a generation after the Russian Revolution, follows a 13-year-old who, with her younger brother, goes in search of her mother and encounters numerous obstacles along the way. PW said the author "paints a vivid, realistic picture of a newly formed communist state." Ages 10-up. (Apr.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Children's Literature

Gloria Whelan's historical fiction book, The Impossible Journey, tells about a family living during the Russian Revolution. This book highlights the family's struggles with the Communist party in St. Petersburg in 1934. The mother and father of this family are arrested for betraying Stalin after the death of Kirov's murder, leaving Marya and Georgi, their two children, with their next-door neighbors when they are sentenced to prison. Marya and Georgi make an impossible journey to Siberia to find their mother—they run away with only a handful of food and money to avoid being sent to an orphanage. On the journey to Siberia, they encounter a doctor who is working for the government and allows the children to use his family's passport to board a train for Siberia. When they leave the train, the children have a hike of more than one thousand miles. The Samoyed tribe helps the children with yet another part of their impossible journey. Read this fascinating book to find out if the children succeed in their long journey through many different lands to reach Siberia. Like good historical fiction, author Whelan shows readers how people lived during the time of the Russian Revolution. It opened up a new door of learning for me about the Russian Revolution, such as the condition of the prison camps in Siberia. I found it a captivating book that I could not put down. 2003, HarperCollins Publisher,
— Lindsay Myers <%ISBN%>0066238110

KLIATT

To quote from the review of the hardcover in KLIATT, January 2003: Rather unsophisticated younger YAs in the 10- to 13-year-old range, who like historical fiction and improbable adventures, are the audience for this novel—the cover art is reflective of this lack of sophistication. The setting is Stalin-era Russia in the 1930s. When their liberal parents are arrested and sent to Siberia, Marya and her little brother Georgi are left with neighbors who don't really want them, so Marya (at 13) decides to travel across Russia to join their mother in Siberia. First they must journey by train for days, and then they face a 1000-mile trek along a major river to the Siberian village where their mother lives in exile. (Their father is in a prison camp, and they don't know where he is.) The journey is the story, essentially, and it is filled with numerous adventures, from attacks by bears and mosquitoes to threats from greedy people and bureaucrats, but above all with resourcefulness on the part of the children (Georgi is only eight years old), and the kindness of strangers—especially the nomadic Samoyed people who herd reindeer in Siberia. These folks take in the children and deliver them safely to their mother, riding the reindeer the final part of the journey. Whelan has done her research and the details of the time and place seem quite real—but readers do have to suspend their disbelief a bit at the improbable elements in the plot. (A companion to Angel on the Square). KLIATT Codes: J—Recommended for junior high school students. 2003, HarperTrophy, 248p., Ages 12 to 15.
—Claire Rosser

School Library Journal

Gr 5-8-A story of a remarkable 13-year-old girl in an extraordinary situation. In Leningrad, in 1934, Marya sets out to find her parents, former aristocrats and therefore considered enemies of the state, who have been sent to Siberia as political prisoners. The spirited and resourceful girl learns that her mother is in Dudinka, a thousand miles from the closest railway station. Marya obtains a few rubles selling her paintings (like Kobe in Homeless Bird [HarperCollins, 2000], Marya's creativity helps sustain her) and buys tickets for herself and her younger brother. At the railway station, the children begin their trek, finding their way by following a river. Some strangers help them; others conspire to report them to the authorities for placement in an orphanage. A tribe of reindeer-herding Samoyeds helps the children to their final stop, where they are reunited with their mother. Papa, who had been sent to a coal-mining camp in Siberia, eventually joins them, but is so ill that he dies at the first signs of spring. Life under Stalin as seen through the eyes of Marya is accessible, well researched, and culturally insightful. Lyrical prose conveys both a strong sense of place and the tremendous love that compels the protagonist to find her parents. Once again, Whelan successfully explores territory less traveled in books for young people.-Connie Tyrrell Burns, Mahoney Middle School, South Portland, ME Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

The year is 1934, and Stalin has begun his own reign of terror, rounding up political dissidents under the slightest pretext. When Marya and Georgi’s parents are taken by the NKVD, they find themselves alone in Leningrad with no support beyond a couple of greedy neighbors. Their mother is relocated to Siberia, their father to a gulag; despite the thousands of miles between them, the children, 13 and 7, respectively, set out alone to join their mother. Whelan, returning to Russia after Angel on the Square (2001) (whose young protagonist is Marya and Georgi’s mother), paints a picture of a country where all live in fear and propaganda has taken over school curricula. The children navigate this perilous terrain with the help of some few good souls and heaps of luck. Chief among these heaps of luck is the convenient group of Samoyeds who befriend the children and take them north on reindeer back; this provides both a charming interlude and a credibility-stretching piece of narrative strategy, turning their improbable journey into a truly impossible one. Marya’s first-person narration effectively conveys the frustration of an older sibling desperately trying to keep a much younger one in line, but otherwise displays a degree of detachment that renders her more a reporter than an actor. Regrettably enough, the Soviet believers exist only as types, making for an unsubtle delineation between good and evil: "Comrade Tikonov stared coldly at me. . . . She gave a cruel laugh." Like its predecessor, this offering takes 21st-century American readers back to a time and place largely ignored in children’s literature; it is a pity that this time and place are not made more immediate and vivid. (Fiction.9-13)