On Our Way Home from the Revolution

<div><b>One of <i>USA Today's </i>10 books to help understand what's happening in Russia and Ukraine</b> In 2014 Sonya Bilocerkowycz is a tourist at a deadly revolution. At first she is enamored with the Ukrainians' idealism which reminds her of her own patriotic family. But when the romantic revolution melts into a war with Russia she becomes disillusioned prompting a return home to the US and the diaspora community that raised her. As the daughter of a man who studies Ukrainian dissidents for a living the granddaughter of war refugees and the great-granddaughter of a gulag victim Bilocerkowycz has inherited a legacy of political oppression. But what does it mean when she discovers a missing page from her family's survival story-one that raises questions about her own guilt? In these linked essays Bilocerkowycz invites readers to meet a swirling cast of post-Soviet characters including a Russian intelligence officer who finds Osama bin Laden a few weeks after 9/11; a Ukrainian poet whose nose gets broken by Russian separatists; and a long-lost relative who drives a bus into the heart of Chernobyl. <i>On Our Way Home from the Revolution</i> muddles our easy distinctions between innocence and culpability agency and fate.</div>