Eleven-year-old Genya lives in Kiev, USSR (now Kyiv, Ukraine) in 1986 with her mother, her mother’s boyfriend, and her three-year-old half-brother. Her mother is an animation artist, and Genya dreams of becoming an artist as well. But first she needs to pass a demanding week-long exam in July to get into the national Art School. Genya’s chances are slim despite her passion and talent; she is Jewish and under the Soviet quota system, only one percent of students admitted are Jewish. Her mother tries to lower her expectations while signing her up for special tutoring with Olga, a former teacher at the school. Genya meets new friends as she prepares to illustrate the kind of propagandistic realistic art that the Soviet commissars demand.
Less than three months before the exam, the Chernobyl nuclear plant explodes and melts down, releasing deadly radiation. Ninety miles away, Kiev is contaminated, but the authorities pretend that nothing is happening. The outdoor May Day parade continues as planned. But rumors spread, and soon people are fleeing the city, including Olga, the art tutor. Genya worries about passing the test without her art tutor. Her parents make her cut her braid because they’ve heard that radiation concentrates in hair. They make her drink iodine added to her irradiated milk. Then her mother takes her and her brother to Volgograd where her aunt lives to keep them safe from this invisible killer. In Volgograd, they are made to feel unwelcome and humiliated. Years of hardship under communism have made people suspicious and stingy.
Eventually, Genya returns to Kiev to take the exam and pursue her dream. All’s well that ends well for her and her family, but many others are not so lucky. Nayberg’s memoir for middle grade readers and up shows what life is like under a totalitarian regime where so many people’s dreams are circumscribed at the behest of a state that shows minimal concern for its people. Readers see the lengths the rulers and their state media go to in order to keep the truth from the population, and how rumors proliferate under these circumstances. However, the greatest strength of Chernobyl, Life, and Other Disasters is its focus on the small things that play an outsized role in Genya’s life – her hair that she grows for five years and proudly braids (until she has to cut it off and throw it away due to radiation), her name that could belong to a boy or a girl leading to multiple misunderstandings, her tendency to read books that she is not quite mature enough for, and, above all, her love of drawing and dreams of becoming a professional artist. While the text is in English, the illustrations of household objects, announcements, and posters are in Russian or Ukrainian and understandable through contextual clues. Through these pictures and the spare but layered text, Nayberg captures vividly and poignantly the experiences of children living during momentous historical events yet still immersed in their ordinary lives.
Chernobyl, Life, and Other Disasters: A Graphic Memoir
Written and illustrated by Evgenia Nayberg
Holiday House, 2026
ISBN 978-0-8234-6278-0
Reviews:
A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection
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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, 2024), by the Angolan author Ondjaki, illustrated by António Jorge Gonçalves.
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