The Memoirs of Nadya Illyushin — Michael I. Sichok

Nadya Illyushin spends her teenage days at Institution, like most young residents of Stary Sovok. Stary is a bleak colony of Russkaya Amerika, established several hundred years ago, after the Great Intercontinental War of 1983. Nadya's nights are spent caring for her widowed, State-employed father and enjoying the company of her sparkling younger sister, Saski. She has never known anything outside of the lackluster world of State-regulated life: an existence of overly restrictive regulation, meager survival, and dependency upon bureaucracy. That is, not until she stumbles upon a mysterious place in the forest - that changes everything, about her past, present and future. Nadya uncovers a secret place of escape - an alternate, parallel reality, where truths are revealed and destinies changed in unpredictable ways. She soon learns that the price of change does not come easily, but once the constraints of rote Stary life have been stripped away, Nadya takes the first steps into realizing her own pivotal role in shaping the future, all while navigating the all-too-human process of self-discovery into adulthood... a future of war, astonishing change, of nadeyat'sya. Nadeyat'sya: The Memoirs of Nadya Illyushin is the first book of the beautiful, sensory Stary Trilogy. While at first glance, it may appear to be dystopian fiction, it literally cannot be pigeonholed under any one genre. It reads as a fictional memoir, told in first person by a very unique and identifiable seventeen-year-old girl. It is told in such an engaging fashion, that reading and re-reading the book becomes more than just an experience of another time and place, it fires memories of situations that the reader may have never even experienced themselves. Nadeyat'sya is as magnetic as it is unforgettable- it was written to be cherished and loved, for all times.