Daughters of victory

In 1917 in Russia, Svetlana, a former aristocrat, is released from a 10-year sentence as a political prisoner and travels to Moscow to reunite with her uncle, the leader of a revolutionary contingent. But she learns that her former lover, Kazimir, has taken over the group after her uncle was killed by a covert assassin. Despite increasing violence from the opposition and a fiery reunion with Kazimir, a resolute Sveltana vows to hunt down her uncle's murderer, no matter the cost. In an alternating narrative set years later, Russia is again a landscape of upheaval as Mila is sent from her home in Leningrad to a farming town to live with her grandmother, the now elderly Svetlana, to escape German armed forces. Mila is quickly drawn to the resistance and infiltrates a garrison of German soldiers. As Mila's work becomes increasingly dangerous, threatening not only her life but those she loves, Svetlana's long-held secrets are shockingly revealed when past and present collide. Meticulously researched, Saab's novel, following her equally captivating The Last Checkmate (2021), blends history, tragedy, and intrigue into her characters' impassioned journeys.

A former aristocrat who embraced the uprising in 1905 Russia shepherds her granddaughter through similar difficult choices during the 1941 Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in the engrossing latest from Saab (after The Last Checkmate). Svetlana Petrova joins her uncle Misha in the Socialist Revolutionary Party, leaving her noble family behind. After 10 years in a czarist prison, she travels to Moscow, where she learns Misha was assassinated during the 1917 revolution and reunites with Kazimir Grigoryevich, her former lover and the father of her daughter, Tatiana, whom she left at a church in Kiev. Though Kazimir suspects Svetlana is a bourgeois infiltrator, she remains determined to aid his anti-Bolshevik efforts with the Socialist Revolutionary Party. Fast forward to 1941 U.S.S.R. where Svetlana, now blind, lives in a remote village in the Vitebsk region. Though Tatiana now despises her, believing Svetlana abandoned her to continue her fight within the Socialist Revolutionary Party, Svetlana agrees to have Tatiana's daughter, Mila, stay with her as the German army approaches. While seeking to keep Mila out of harm's way, Svetlana eventually realizes that the survival of her granddaughter may require her to face secrets from her past. Saab brings a magnetic authenticity to the proceedings as her richly drawn characters make life and death decisions. Historical fiction fans will be riveted. Agent: Kaitlyn Johnson, Belcastro Agency. (Jan.)

Saab's 2021 debut novel, The Last Checkmate, featured a teenage heroine whose chess skills help her survive Auschwitz. Drawing again on catastrophic upheavals of history, Saab now portrays young women able to hold their own as fierce fighters and political plotters. The titular daughters are three generations of Russian women whose adventuresome lives span revolution and war, 1917--43. Svetlana rejects her noble roots, joins the Social Revolutionaries to battle the Bolsheviks, and tries to assassinate Lenin. Her daughter, Tatiana, is left in a Ukrainian orphanage but World War II finds her in the siege of Leningrad. The granddaughter, Mila, sent to shelter with Svetlana in Vitebsk, joins the anti-German partisans. Weaponless, she uses forest mushrooms to poison the hated occupiers. Dedication to lofty political goals does not distract the women from passionate attachments to their manly comrades-in-arms. The action between the sheets rivals the action in the streets. Challenged by hateful enemies, Saab's protagonists absorb punishing blows, but their wily resilience lets them live and love another day. VERDICT Reminiscent of Janet Fitch's novels about the Russian Revolution, Saab's book indulgently lingers too long in several plot complications.--Barbara Conaty