We’ve got the decorations up, we’re doing the holiday preparations, the kids are heading into exams, but it’s hard to believe it’s really December. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.Ĭhapter 16: One of the things that’s so unsettling for those of us here in Tennessee is how warm it has been. Our conversation covered a lot of ground, starting with the weather before quickly getting into the ways we are all shared recipients of and participants in history. Ruta Sepetys spoke with Chapter 16 by phone in early December. But Cristian is a writer, and even as he finds himself entangled in a web of complications and deceit, he believes he has the ability to help, to make a difference through his words.
Never knowing who might be an informer to the Securitate officers, Cristian and everyone around him live in fear and mistrust. The regime limits everything: access to information, food, electricity, and even their ability to trust one another. Photo: Rachel Kinney StudiosĬristian is a teenager, living in a small apartment in Bucharest with his parents, his sister, and his grandfather (Bunu). Thanks to Sepetys’ careful research and respectful approach, the people living under the Ceaușescu regime in Romania in the late 1980s are brought to life, most notably the protagonist Cristian.
With her latest, I Must Betray You, award-winning Sepetys returns to the difficult task of telling an unfamiliar story from history, one that deserves a much wider awareness. Nashville resident Ruta Sepetys has been a mainstay in young adult literature since 2011, when Between Shades of Gray changed so much about how we view historical fiction and YA. FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This interview originally appeared on January 31, 2022.
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