I must betray you by Ruta Sepetys - hachette

Cristian is a seventeen-year-old student in Romania. He is very clever. He loves reading and writing and wish he could become one day a poet or a writer. However, he lives in Romania. Back in the 80’s, Ceausescu was the leader and a cruel dictator. The communist regime did not allow people to travel abroad, to be in contact with outsiders or to express their own feelings.

Cristian goes to school and is fascinated by the English language. He always carries a notebook where he likes writing new words, poems or observations. He is keeping his notes in a safe place because he knew he could get into trouble if someone would find out about his thoughts and his words. Page 3, he says "Words are weapons". He is very intelligent, very closed to his inspirational grand-father and has some good friends.

One day, he’s asked to go to the school office without knowing that his life would radically change from that point. Cristian has a meeting with an agent of the Securitate, Romanian’s fearsome secret police, who is pretending to know what Cristian has done. What had he done ? “The truth was, most Romanians broke the rules someway. There were so many to break. And so many to report that you had broken them”.

Will Cristian make his dream come true? Will he be able to study philosophy and poetry when everything you actually say or even thinks is controlled by the State?

I must betray you is a work of historical fiction.  It essentially focuses on a young boy and his day-to-day struggles living in a country where people did not have access to food or freedom of speech. I was just so impressed by the number of details the writer is delivering in this novel. It’s based on many years of research about Romanian history and communism.  The chronological approach makes it readable and very interesting. It shows how difficult it was for people to build up relationships not only within their peers in school but also among their family. They had absolutely nothing and did not know what was going on in the rest of the world. In the book it says that there were some occasions when they could watch illegally an American movie and could not believe their eyes what life was like somewhere else. There are lots of conversations in this book and the writer also highlights people’s sense of humour even if they were facing some very hard time. I’ve travelled various time to Romania and reading this book just echoed with some stories I’ve had the chance to listen to. But I also learned more about Doina Cornea, the jilava prison and how the revolution started in Timisoara.

It’s such a powerful novel based on real events.