Every good family saga features a wedding, and this one boasts two. First, Alina marries Fedir. The newlyweds receive land with a dacha built on it to set them up for the future. Soon they\u2019ll have a \u201csea of gold\u201d\u2014sunflowers that provide food, oil, and mulch. Alina becomes a baker and makes offerings to \u201cBA BA SPODIVATYSYA,\u201d an ancient oak tree. The couple\u2019s daughter, Yana, is born in 1991, as Ukraine wins its independence from Russia. Years later, the second wedding\u2014Yana\u2019s, to a young man named Andreyev\u2014is accompanied by rumors of Russian aggression toward Ukraine. Yana and Andreyev\u2019s daughter, Oxana, is born with the expectation that she, too, will farm sunflowers. Then the Russians invade. The family house is set on fire; Oxana stops speaking. Alina, Yana, and Oxana, separated from their husbands and fathers, escape to Poland, then to America to live with Alina\u2019s brother. Oxana\u2019s sadness persists until it\u2019s time to plant sunflower seeds there. Hidden within her doll are her family\u2019s sunflower seeds, and sharing them reawakens her joy as she\u2019s reminded of her homeland. With this methodically paced, poignant story, Polacco draws on her own Ukrainian heritage with illustrations of babushkas, their homes festooned with icons that evoke folksy farm scenes and resplendent sunflower fields. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Every good family saga features a wedding, and this one boasts two. First, Alina marries Fedir. The newlyweds receive land with a dacha built on it to set them up for the future. Soon they\u2019ll have a \u201csea of gold\u201d\u2014sunflowers that provide food, oil, and mulch. Alina becomes a baker and makes offerings to \u201cBA […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":1248,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1247"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1247"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1247\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1248"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}