In the Stalinist era of the Soviet Union, ten-year-old Sasha idolizes his father, a devoted Communist, but when police take his father away and leave Sasha homeless, he is forced to examine his own perceptions, values, and beliefs.

When twelve-year-old Arcady is sent to a children's home after his parents are declared enemies of the state in Soviet Russia, soccer becomes a way to secure extra rations, respect, and protection but it may also be his way out if he can believe in and love another person--and himself.

"During the summer of 1953, thirteen-year-old Marty's parents are suspected of communist sympathies, upending his life and causing him to question what it really means to be a patriotic American"--

Starting in 1972 when she is nine years old, Ling, the daughter of two doctors, struggles to make sense of the communists' Cultural Revolution, which empties stores of food, homes of appliances deemed "bourgeois," and people of laughter.

Set during the height of the Russian Revolution and told in alternating voices, sixteen-year-old Evgenia--a peasant and proud member of the Bolshevik party--agrees to help a seventeen-year-old bourgeois girl traverse the war-torn countryside in search of safety, but Anna is harboring a secret that could cost them their lives. Includes historical note and author's note.