We had a Book Fair at my school, Live Oak Elementary in Santa Cruz, last September and I was looking for a book to buy. I saw one called Kidnapped From Ukraine, Under Attack. That looked interesting for me, since I like stories about kidnapping and murder. That was right before my birthday, so my dad bought it for me as a birthday present and as soon as I finished my other book I was reading, I started reading the “Kidnapped” book.
I loved the book. It’s my favorite book I’ve read so far. Some people rush through books, but I wanted to understand it, so I tried not to read it too fast. The book tells the story of Dariia, a girl living in Mariupol, Ukraine, when it was attacked by the Russians in February 2022.
Dariia got separated from her dad and twin sister and her mom and her kept finding shelters in basements. Then one of their shelters got bombed. Then they found a car and drove it, but the Russians saw them and took them to a camp. They had to stay there until they got a new family.
Dariia got a new Russian mom and brother and sister and the new family also had a baby. This family had a lot of stolen things around their apartment, and Dariia got one of the phones and texted her real family. Her mom came and rescued her and brought her home to Ukraine and Dariia got to meet up with her twin sister again.
I liked the book so much, I sent some questions to the author, Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch, in an email, and she answered them. I found out the book I read was the first of a trilogy of three books.
COCO KETTMANN: Will we find out in the second book if Dariia gets her dad back?
MARSHA FORCHUK SKRYPUCH: Her Dad’s situation becomes clear in book #3, Still Alive. In book #2 Standoff, Rada and Dad get to the Azovstal Steel Plant which is bombed by the Russians for 86 days straight.
CK: Is “Dariia” a Ukrainian name? I have never heard it,
MFS: Yes, it’s a popular Ukrainian girl’s name. It means a person who embodies goodness.
CK: Did you worry that some kids reading the book might get scared and have bad dreams?
MFS: I’m glad to know that you didn’t find the book scary and didn’t have bad dreams. I realize that there are some kids and adults who would find Under Attack too scary to read, but the War is still happening and people in Ukraine are living through this day to day and have been for several years. A reader who finds it scary can set the book down, and I would encourage them to talk to their parents about the parts that frighten them. I think it’s better to know about these things rather than hide from the truth, and it’s better to air it out than to keep it in. I know a lot of kids and parents who are reading the book together.
CK: One of the most dramatic parts of the book was the start of Chapter Sixteen, Out of Mind, on page 175 to 176, where you write, “I surfaced and almost managed to gulp in air.” How did you get the idea for this part?
MFS: The inspiration for that scene is the reality of how captured Ukrainian kids are treated. Some kids have been rescued and they have shocking stories about what happened to them. A swimming pool, which is normally a fun place, is being used to torture. The scariest part of that for Dariia is that she now realizes anything in the facility can be used to hurt her, even if it looks totally normal. This is a method of brainwashing a person: keeping them in line for fear of punishment.
CK: Why do you write about this stuff?
MFS: I write about it because I can. I have a deep sense of empathy and responsibility to be the voice of people who are suffering but can’t tell their own story. There are a lot of people who have totally forgotten that the war in Ukraine is still raging on and that every day, Russia targets schools, hospitals, playgrounds and apartment buildings with missiles. By writing about this in novel form, readers can plunge themselves inside a regular person who was leading a normal life until suddenly, the country beside them attacks. There is a larger significance too: if the world lets Russia get away with waging war on its neighbor just because it’s bigger and stronger, other countries might get the idea to do the same thing.
CK: How did you become a writer?
MFS: I didn’t like to read when I was a kid. I am dyslexic, and so it was hard for me at the beginning. I failed 4th grade, and my teacher deemed me unteachabl. I decided to teach myself how to read by taking Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens out of the library, and slowly, relentlessly over the course of a year, taught myself how to read. Doing that changed my life because that book was such a good story, about a kid that everyone wrote off. I could see the story like a movie in my head. I read other big books like that and was immersed in all these big stories that played like movies in my head. I decided that I wanted to write books and put movies into peoples’ heads. In 8th grade I wrote a 64 page book, but it wasn’t very good. I LOVED writing it though. I did a degree in English lit in college and a master of Library Science to find out as much as I could about books. I did freelance writing for newspapers and magazines for a while, and then started writing books. My first book was published twenty-nine years ago, and it’s still in print: Silver Threads, a picture book illustrated by Michael Marchenko. It wasn’t the first book I submitted to publishers. The first was a big fat novel that got 100 rejections. I tore it apart and over the years rewrote it into 6 different books that all got published. It takes a lot of writing, rewriting, re-re-writing, to write a book! I’ve written something like twenty-eight books in all. Check them out here: calla.com/wordpress/books.
CK: What were your favorite books you read as a kid? Or favorite authors?
MFS: I kind of skipped over the whole kids’ book thing as a kid because of my learning problems. But the books I write are the books I wished were available to me when I was a kid. I rediscovered kids’ books in library school and fell in love with LM Montgomery, Jean Little, Robert Munsch – these are Canadian authors. I also liked Madeleine L’Engle and Ursula LeGuin. I love Suzanne Collins and Philip Pullman now.
CK: What are you working on now?
MFS: A big fat Medieval trilogy, likely for adults, about a real girl who gets captured as a slave and ends up being an empress. Thanks for the great questions!
