Telling The Story That Cannot Be Told

“Once upon a time, something happened. If it had not happened, it would not be told.” So begins the narrative of 10-year-old Ileana, growing up in Bucharest, Romania, in the bleak and terrifying final years of Nicolae Ceausescu’s deranged leadership. With no friends in a nation suspicious of both acquaintances and strangers, any of whom could be informers for the dreaded Securitate, Ileana sits at home alone working on her Great Tome, a scrapbook of drawings, poems, and fractured fairy tales. One day a strange man comes to her small apartment and installs listening devices to find out who in the family has been helping Ileana’s Uncle Andrei, a dissident under arrest. To protect her, Ileana’s father destroys the Great Tome, and she’s sent to a remote village in the Carpathian Mountains to live with grandparents she has never met.

At first resistant, Ileana becomes a part of village life, where food is more plentiful and the residents carry out their own passive resistance against the regime. Ileana hears the stories – some traditional tales, others memories of the Second World War and her own mother’s lifetime – and from them she draws the strength to defend the village alongside her first real friend when Securitate threaten to wipe it out.

J. Kasper Kramer’s debut novel for middle grade readers – really for everyone – was inspired by the stories of Romanian friends and her own study of fairy tales and history. As a child who dreams of becoming a writer like her father and uncle and who chafes against the rules that constrict her, Ileana has a strong, distinctive first-person voice. Her rewriting of the legend of Cunning Ileana, the young princess for whom she’s been named, parallels her current situation and the way people compromise their values to please powerful and sadistic rulers. Her uncompromising sense of right and wrong will appeal to middle grade readers as it calls on their elders to listen to the children and act for their future. The moment for this historical novel is now.

While The Story That Cannot Be Told is based on real events surrounding the fall of Ceausescu, its fairy tale elements will appeal to readers of fantasy. It nicely complements Marjorie Agosín’s Pura Belpré Award-winning middle grade novel I Lived on Butterfly Hill, which uses elements of magic realism to portray a budding writer living under dictatorship and exiled from her home.