Nothing could make the obsequious spectacle earlier this month in Alaska more shocking, but while President Donald Trump was waiting on the red carpet, clapping for an international killer, I was reading a book about the destruction of one humble family in Ukraine. For a moment, that clash between private sympathy and public sycophancy cast the world in a light almost too harsh to endure.
With “The Sunflower Boys,” Sam Wachman, a writer all of 25 years old, has created that rarest phenomenon: a war novel that feels at once timeless and precisely of the moment. Inspired in part by stories he heard while volunteering at a camp for Ukrainian children in Romania, Wachman’s book contains no trumpet blast of military strategy, no parchment of international politics. Instead, in these pages, we confront the horrors that Vladimir Putin unleashed as they’re experienced by a frightened 12-year-old boy named Artem. His narration is more revealing about the costs of this brutal invasion than any numbing tally of casualties could ever be.
A bloody fissure in recent history accounts for the cleft structure of “The Sunflower Boys.” Throughout the long opening section, Artem describes the simple joys and anxieties of his life in Chernihiv, a city in northern Ukraine that will feel surprisingly foreign and familiar to American readers. With big-sibling equanimity, Artem tolerates the demands of his 8-year-old brother, Yuri. He misses their Tato (father), who has been working in the United States for so long that he can barely remember the man, but he adores the art supplies sent from abroad. And he tries, most days, to stay on the right side of his hilariously stern seventh-grade teacher.
Boyhood – not recollected in tranquility but lived in the present tense – is a delicate tone to get right in a coming-of-age novel. Sentimental cloyingness and knowing irony are constant dangers for any writer rafting down this river. But Wachman navigates with exceptional skill. Just on the cusp of his teenage years, Artem is a kid with a heart full to bursting. He speaks with a naturally poetic voice that’s a lustrous amalgam of sweetness and urgency.
We see that especially in the way the boy’s concerns slip along the sweaty rope of adolescence. New medication easily controls Artem’s periodic seizures, but he’s more concerned about controlling his attraction to a dashing boy at school. He’s innocent enough to draw pictures of his friend but self-conscious enough to know there’s something dangerous about those skillful images. Classmates have started teasing him with homophobic asides, and his mother’s no help when she predicts, “Soon you’ll start bringing girls home.”
With no gay role models and no one to talk with, Artem prays to be delivered from these longings. In lonely despair, he blames his father for neglecting him. “If Tato had been here,” Artem thinks, “he would have taught me the right way to be a man while I was still a boy, before it was too late.”
But events are about to teach Artem that being a man has nothing to do with whom he loves, only how bravely he behaves.
Early in the morning on the 24th of February – a month that means “cruel” in Ukrainian – Artem wakes to thunder. Then the chirps of car alarms in the distance. “The teakettle shrieks again, closer this time,” Artem says. “There are two more explosions. The first one shakes the floor. When the second comes, our bedroom window shatters. Glass sprays across our bedroom. Yuri screams.”
Just as quickly as Chernihiv changed in 2022, so “The Sunflower Boys” breaks from domestic life to violent terror. “There was no time to get dressed,” Artem says, “but I’m too frightened to be embarrassed about our neighbors seeing me in my underwear.” During an unspeakable scene of atrocity repeated far too many times in Ukraine, Artem and his little brother are suddenly separated from their family. Home is no longer an option – no longer a home. “We would stay there and starve,” Artem concludes, “trapped in our grief, stranded in the past like whales beaching themselves to feel the warmth of the sun.” With no one to guide them, these two young brothers must try to make their way to safety across a deadly hellscape.
From February to April of that year, Putin destroyed about 70% of Chernihiv. This is Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” not as apocalyptic dystopia but as historical realism. Artem struggles to protect his little brother from bullets, missiles and sights he can never unsee. When Yuri is too weak, Artem carries him. “Everything around us is a potential bomb,” he says. “How little I know about this new world.” Haunted by the prospect of letting his absent father down, he strains to find food and shelter – strains even to find the words for what they’re enduring. “The wail presses in on us from all sides,” he says about the constant sirens. “It sucks the air out of the air” – a perfect note of repetition that only unconscious artfulness could strike.
Suspense is threaded with dread in these chapters. The possibility of happiness, even survival, is heavily taxed by irrecoverable losses.
Hearing about “The Sunflower Boys,” a friend asked me, “Why would anyone want to read that?”
As Artem freely admits – with weary wisdom no child should possess – this is “just another shattered family.” But that’s the function of a fine novel: to dissolve a dismissive phrase like “just another” in the milk of human empathy.
“I don’t want to start crying,” Artem says. “I’m afraid that, once the tears start, they won’t stop.”
I know the feeling. I read much of “The Sunflower Boys” aloud to my wife, but there were moments, honestly, when either I couldn’t go on or she couldn’t bear to hear more, and I would just read in silence.
Ron Charles reviews books and writes the Book Club newsletter for the Washington Post. He is the book critic for “CBS Sunday Morning.”