Even the most abundant wheat harvest provides a small Ukrainian farm community with just bare sustenance. So when Soviet soldiers arrive in little Marusia’s village, demanding that all the farmers hand over their entire crop, they are in effect sentencing them to starvation. Defying their orders, Marusia hides a sack of grain in her hope chest.

As the folktale-cum-political satire in Skrypuch’s second picture book unfolds, it becomes apparent that her efforts to compress the events of the Ukrainian famine of 1932-3 lead not to dramatic clarity, but instead, at times, to the uneasy, reductive territory of agitprop. (When Ukrainian farmers opposed Stalin’s program of farm collectivization, the Soviet government raised the grain quota to a punishingly high level to crush their resistance, resulting in the death by starvation of an estimated seven million people.) Michael Martchenko’s characteristically broad cartoon-style illustrations only reinforce the agitprop tone without capturing the folktale’s subtle shifts in emotion.

In the spring Marusia plants the seeds she’s hidden, and a Jack-and-the-Beanstalk-size stalk zooms skyward. She offers a hungry stork some seeds from it, and in appreciation for her generosity, the stork flies her to a Canadian-Ukrainian prairie farm community who provide a sack of seeds for the village farmers to plant. They do and their crop is again seized by Soviet soldiers. The ingenious and indomitable Marusia then arrives at a clever scheme to hide the next harvest, managing to outwit Stalin himself.

Children will respond to this folktale’s wistful magic, inventiveness, and humour. However, the confusingly presented historical situation, too mature and complex for the picture book format, will be lost on them.