He must to do "mandatory volunteerism" on his days off and when he finishes school he will be assigned a menial job for the rest of his life.īut there is more, there are spies and bugs everywhere, even the family's apartment, even the bathroom is not safe. Cristian's parents work six days a week, twelve hours a day, while Cristian goes to school until 7pm six days a week. He and his family of five live in a tiny one bedroom apartment, Cristine sleeps in a closet, there is never enough food and they must stand in line for hours to get the tiniest bits of it. Now Cristian knows that this is all there is, nothing to look forward to, nothing will change unless it gets worse although there is not much worse than what they are living. In 1989, seventeen year old Cristian Florescu has never known anything else but the spirit and life crushing existence under this regime but from his grandfather he knows that things used to be so much better. While I knew some of what went on in Romania during the tyrannical twenty four year rule of Nicolae Ceaușescu, I wasn't aware of the details that we get from this story. But what is the cost of freedom?Ī gut-wrenching, startling window into communist Romania and the citizen spy network that devastated a nation, from the number one New York Times best-selling, award-winning author of Salt to the Sea and Between Shades of Gray. He eagerly joins the revolution to fight for change when the time arrives. He’s left with only two choices: betray everyone and everything he loves-or use his position to creatively undermine the most notoriously evil dictator in Eastern Europe.Ĭristian risks everything to unmask the truth behind the regime, give voice to fellow Romanians, and expose to the world what is happening in his country.
Seventeen-year-old Cristian Florescu dreams of becoming a writer, but Romanians aren’t free to dream they are bound by rules and force.Īmidst the tyrannical dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu in a country governed by isolation and fear, Cristian is blackmailed by the secret police to become an informer.
Communist regimes are crumbling across Europe.
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