The Last Green Valley

"What you seek is what you will find, but only if you hunt it with all your heart and mind."

"Not always," Emil said.

"Always," Corporal Gheorghe insisted.

The last book that I finished in 2024, The Last Green Valley by Mark Sullivan, echoes my chosen word of the year for 2025. It is essentially a novel about perseverance, the main characters keep moving forward even in the face of overwhelming difficulties and setbacks. It is also a story about love in a world of hate, a story that examines the human drive towards survival while keeping one's humanity intact while doing so.

I read this book to satisfy the December prompt in my Crossing Continents reading challenge -- a book set in eastern Europe. The novel starts out in a small village in Ukraine toward the end of World War II. Many residents of the farming community -- including our main characters, the Martel family -- are Volksdeutsche, the German community that the Czar had invited to Ukraine a century earlier because of their skill for growing winter wheat, feeding the Russian Empire. A branch of my own family came from this heritage although they were scattered to the winds following the First World War and the Russian Revolution, prior to Stalin's deportations of the farmers to Siberia which was one of the factors leading to the millions of deaths during the 1932-1933 famine. This added another layer to my fascination with this novel.

The Martels -- Adeline and Emil with their sons Walt and Will -- endeavor to escape Stalin's troops, bearing down on them, by reluctantly fleeing under the protection of the Nazis. Adeline has instilled in them all a dream of a lovely green valley surrounded by mountains with a river running through the middle. It is this dream that helps sustain them in their constant push through devastation and despair as armies battle, loss and retreats leading to changing fortunes with starvation and illness ensuing. Their faith -- strong, lost, rediscovered -- pushes them through unforeseen separations and intense loneliness.

It is the love that Adeline and Emil share towards each other and their sons that brighten the many trying periods in their journey, a journey that is very rarely going in the direction of their dream. The remarkable courage that Emil shows also sustains Adeline and this, in turn, is passed to the sons. The remainder of the extended family who begin the refugee march with them never share this courage nor the level of love and faith.

Author Mark Sullivan has stated that a tremendous amount of research went into this novel and it shows, right down to the accuracy in dates and weather for even minor events late in the war and the post-surrender period. The historical background adds to the rich tapestry of human emotions our attachment to Adeline and Emil Martel evoke in us, the reader.

I rate The Last Green Valley as my favorite book read in 2024, tied with The Book Woman's Daughter which I read much earlier in the year. An easy 5-star award on this one full of characters who persevere through not only their love and faith but a profound stubbornness that I share with them, albeit in much less dire circumstances.

"If you must look back, try to find the beauty and the benefit in every cruelty done to you. If you must think about the future, try to have no expectations about it."