thistlechaser | Book #45 of 2025: I Must Betray You

I Must Betray You by Ruta Sepetys.

Quick synopsis: Set in Romania in 1989, the citizens of the country are starving under Nicolae Ceaușescu. The story follows a young boy (Cristian) as he lives through the end of Ceaușescu's rule and revolution.

Brief opinion: I almost never read books set in the real world, but I'm always interested in stories set in Communist countries and I've never read one set in Romania, so I picked this one up. For a YA book, it was quite chilling! It glossed over very little (torture was briefly describe but sexual assault was only mentioned in a line -- that had to have been happening a lot more during this time).

Plot: Romania, 1989. The secret police have every apartment bugged. Nearly every citizen is reporting on their neighbors. And everyone has to wait on hours long lines for the most rotten bits of food. People can be dragged in and questioned/tortured for any reason at all... or for no reason.

Cristian is a boy (preteen? teen?) living at home with his family. Parents, grandfather, brother and sister all living in a one bedroom apartment that usually has no electricity or heat. He's a good student, but his grandfather remembers when the country was free and speaks too often and too loudly of that.

The family comes to the attention of the secret police and things go from bad to worse for Cristian. Eventually revolution spreads across the country, but the story handles it as a realistic thing: So much death, pain, and a slow shift of power until the military changes sides.

Writing/editing: Both were excellent.

What I Liked/What I Didn’t Like: There were only two things I didn't like, one small and one big:

The small one was that every chapter (all 81 of them) had a title in Romanian -- untranslated. I wish a translation had been included.

The big one was that I didn't enjoy the ending (the revolution, though it wasn't so much a "happy ending"). It makes complete sense to include it when you're telling the story of Romania and Ceaușescu, but I was more interested in the secret police, neighbors spying on neighbors, and life under Communist dictatorship rule.

I liked everything else. All the characters, from big to tiny, were completely believable. The setting was so well described. The writing was great.

Rating: 1-Hated / 2-Disliked / 3-Okay / 4-Liked / 5-Loved: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️½. My interest wavered through the ending, even though it made complete sense to finish the book with the revolution.

[Edit: Ah ha, this author also wrote Between Shades of Gray, which I read in 2017, about a young girl living under Communist in Lithuania. I gave that book five stars; clearly I need to read more by this author!]

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DNF #32: Braking Day by Adam Oyebanji. An adult fiction book that felt very much like a YA one. (Some people might mean that as an insult, but I don't.)

Set on a generation ship leaving Earth and heading for a new world, Ravi is an engineer-in-training... and also the worst kind of YA main character. He was supposed to be a smart kid, but even when the lives of everyone on the ship could be at risk, he never did the smart thing: Just tell an adult what's happening.

DNFed about 40% in.