Looking at Women Looking at War by Victoria Amelina Book Review

About the Book:

When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Victoria Amelina was busy writing a novel, taking part in the country’s literary scene, and parenting her son. Now she became someone new: a war crimes researcher and the chronicler of extraordinary women like herself who joined the resistance. These heroines include Evgenia, a prominent lawyer turned soldier, Oleksandra, who documented tens of thousands of war crimes and won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, and Yulia, a librarian who helped uncover the abduction and murder of a children’s book author.

Everyone in Ukraine knew that Amelina was documenting the war. She photographed the ruins of schools and cultural centers; she recorded the testimonies of survivors and eyewitnesses to atrocities. And she slowly turned back into a storyteller, writing what would become this book.

On the evening of June 27th, 2023, Amelina and three international writers stopped for dinner in the embattled Donetsk region. When a Russian cruise missile hit the restaurant, Amelina suffered grievous head injuries, and lost consciousness. She died on July 1st. She was thirty-seven. She left behind an incredible account of the ravages of war and the cost of resistance. Honest, intimate, and wry, this book will be celebrated as a classic.

My Review:

Living in the U.S., I have never had the experience of being in a war zone. I cannot even imagine what it must be like. Reading this book helped me gain some perspective on what it is like to be in Ukraine war activities having started already in 2014. So many people have lost everything.

I was particularly impacted by her experience of crossing a street when under an air raid alert. Acknowledging that she and those she was with had a greater chance of being killed by missile than a car, they nonetheless walked back to the crosswalk and waited for the green light. “There are no clear rules for surviving the war,” she wrote, “but there are still rules for living.” (1674/4590) One can still be polite, be elegant, and be human. Such was her attitude while investigating war crimes committed against her fellow Ukrainians.

Since Amelina was killed while she was still researching and writing, editors have compiled her material to highlight lessons learned by the novelist turned war crimes investigator. Some of the material is presented as notes and unfinished sentences. That draws more attention to her death before she finished her work. It may be a little hard to read in some areas but well worth the effort.

My rating: 4/5 stars.

About the Author:

Victoria Amelina was killed by a Russian missile in July, 2023. She was an award-winning Ukrainian novelist, essayist, poet, and human rights activist whose prose and poems have been translated into many languages. In 2019/2020 she lived and traveled extensively in the US. She wrote both in Ukrainian and English, and her essays have appeared in Irish Times, Dublin Review of Books, and Eurozine. Photo credit: May Lee.

St Martin's Press, 320 pages.

I received a complimentary egalley of this book from the publisher. My comments are an independent and honest review.'

(My star ratings: 5-I love it, 4-I like it, 3-It's OK, 2-I don't like it, 1-I hate it.)