As war in the Middle East pushes the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine from the news, this is a good time to remember the terror experienced by the residents of the seaside city of Mariupol on February 24, 2022, and in the weeks afterward. Bestselling author/illustrator Don Brown chronicles those events in his graphic novel for teens 83 Days in Mariupol: A War Diary.
The war diary belongs not to any individual in the city of 560,000 at the time of the invasion but to the city itself. We do not see the city before the moment the first bombs fell. We do not know what life was like for the people before. This is a portrait of destruction that begins with one man, Vladimir Putin, spewing lies about the Ukrainian people from his office in Moscow, shown in the book’s first spread. A regional map helps readers see how close Mariupol is to areas of Ukraine that Russian-backed separatists had seized in 2014 and the city’s importance for creating a land bridge to Crimea, also seized by Russia in 2014. The city and its people don’t stand a chance. The day-to-day entries are a portrait of a net tightening around them—first bombing, then tanks marked with the ominous “Z” and ground troops brutalizing the population. The pen-and-ink drawings depict these atrocities in shadows, evoking the torture, rape, and killing of civilians without making it explicit.
Most of the individual stories are told through the testimony of survivors who spoke to journalists after their escape from the city. As a result, the translations were done by interpreters or the journalists themselves, and their words are directly quoted in the text panels of the graphic novel. The observations of survivors give their experiences of leaving the city in convoys under Russian fire or hiding out in the tunnels underneath the Azovstal plant equal weight to the atrocities that were well-publicized in the media at the time, such as the bombing of the maternity hospital and the theater where 1,500 civilians had taken shelter and the Russian word for children, дети, was clearly visible.
83 Days in Mariupol offers teen readers a portrait of war that focuses on the civilians subjected to the terror of a war of aggression they never asked for. Today, the city of Mariupol lies in ruins, except for a stretch of prime waterfront property where the Russian despot has brought in people from his country to enjoy the spoils of war. The 100,000 Ukrainians who survived the siege and remain in the city now live among the ruins and work in conditions of near slavery for the Russians. As the book points out, about 20,000 civilians died during the siege, and Brown’s afterword written in 2023 assessing the status of the war is still true today.
83 Days in Mariupol: A War Diary
Written and illustrated by Don Brown
Clarion, 2023
128 pp.
ISBN 978-0-06-331157-2 (pb)
Reviews and Awards:
Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books
CCBC Choices, 2024
YALSA Great Graphic Novels for Teens, 2024
You can buy a copy of 83 Days in Mariupol here or find it in a library here.
Book purchases made via our affiliate link may earn GLLI a small commission.Lyn Miller-Lachmann is the author of the YA historical novel Torch (Carolrhoda Lab, 2022), winner of the 2023 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Young Adult Literature and a 2022 Booklist Editors’ Choice, and the YA verse novel Eyes Open (Carolrhoda Lab 2024), chosen by Booklist as a Top 10 Historical Fiction for Youth, 2024. She wrote the picture book Ways to Play (Levine Querido, 2023), illustrated by Gabriel Alborozo, and co-authored with Zetta Elliott the middle grade verse novel Moonwalking (FSG, 2022). Her nonfiction includes a biography of Temple Grandin in the She Persisted chapter book series from Philomel and Film Makers: 15 Groundbreaking Women Directors (co-authored with Tanisia “Tee” Moore) from Chicago Review Press. She translates books for youth from Portuguese to English, including the 2023 YA graphic novel Pardalita by Joana Estrela, published by Levine Querido, which was named a Batchelder Honor Book in 2024 and the graphic novel Our Beautiful Darkness (Enchanted Lion), by the Angolan author Ondjaki, illustrated by António Jorge Gonçalves.
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