Welcome to the PKSCA Book Club!
Normally Book Club discussions are held via Zoom on the last Thursday evening of odd-numbered months (with the exception of November, when we meet the Thursday prior to Thanksgiving)—7:00 p.m. start, Portland time. But our first two discussion meetings of 2025 (The Don Flows Home to the Sea and A Gentleman From Moscow) were not well attended, and the decision has been made to postpone discussion of the current selection, Anne Blankman’s The Blackbird Girls, from May 29th until July 31st, which will provide us time to survey those on the PKSCA e-mail list regarding interest and availability to participate in Book Club discussions. Readings over the past three years have transported us through 19th-century tsarist Russia into the Soviet period as far as the 1960s, and The Blackbird Girls moves us into the Gorbachev era of the late 1980s. Background information about the author and novel are provided below, along with links to discussion questions and to the discussion itself, now scheduled for the end of July.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Anne Blankman grew up in a book-loving family in Niskayuna, New York, a small town near Albany. Writing stories from an early age, she ended up double-majoring in English and history as an undergraduate at Union College, continuing on to earn a master’s degree in information science, which then landed her a job as a youth services librarian after college. Her debut novel, Prisoner of Night and Fog, was published in 2014 to rave reviews from Publishers Weekly and the Association of Jewish Libraries. (Though written for a teenage audience, this and subsequent novels are adult in theme and content.) A year later, Conspiracy of Blood and Smoke (sequel to Prisoner of Night and Fog) became a National Jewish Book Award Finalist and a VOYA (“Voice of Youth Advocates”) “Perfect Ten.” Blankman’s 2016 novel, Traitor Angels, won the Bank Street College of Education Best Book of the Year, and in 2020 The Blackbird Girls was an instant best seller as well. Her 2025 book, The Enemy’s Daughter, was named one of Amazon’s Best Books of the Month. Currently Anne lives in Richmond, Virginia, with her husband, Mike, and daughter Kirsten.
ABOUT THE NOVEL
Anne Blankman’s inspiration for writing The Blackbird Girls goes back to her school days in Niskayuna, where she met a classmate who had survived Chernobyl. The two became close friends (and have remained so), and 20 years later Blankman completed writing the book. Set in 1986 in the Ukrainian town where the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant is located, the novel begins with a focus on two 5th-grade girls whose fathers are critically injured by the explosion, transforming the lives of their families as well as their personal relationship with each other. Paralleling two major disasters in Soviet history, WWII and Chernobyl, the novel’s themes run the gamut from government deception to anti-Semitism to domestic abuse to loving kindness. One reviewer summed it up this way: “Powerful, beautifully written, unforgettable.”
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