Little foxes took up matches

Summary: "When Mitya was two years old, he swallowed his grandmother's sewing needle. For his family, it marks the beginning of the end. As he grows, his life mirrors the uncertain future of his country, which is attempting to rebuild itself after the collapse of the Soviet Union, torn between its past and the promise of modern freedom. Mitya finds himself facing a different sort of ambiguity: is he a boy, as everyone keeps telling him, or is he not quite a boy, as he often feels? After suffering horrific abuse from his cousin, Vovka, who has returned broken from war, Mitya embarks on a journey across underground Moscow to find something better, a place to belong. His experiences are interlaced with a retelling of a foundational Russian fairy tale, Koschei the Deathless, offering an element of fantasy to the brutal realities of Mitya's everyday life. Told with deep empathy, humor, and a bit of surreality, Katya Kazbek's Little Foxes Took Up Matches is a revelation about the life of one community in a country of turmoil and upheaval, glimpsed through the eyes of a precocious and empathetic child whose heart and mind understand that there are often more than two choices"--