I Must Betray You by Ruta Sepetys (audiobok)

 genre: historical fiction

Cristian Florescu's life in Romania in 1989 is a lot of things: it's waiting in lines to get food. It's whispering with the radio on so the secret police can't hear you. It's never knowing who you can trust. It's fear and want and frustration. What it doesn't have?  Freedom.  And more than anything, Christian wants freedom for himself and for his fellow Romanians but under the thumb of Nicolae Ceaușescu, freedom can be nothing more than a dream.   When he's blackmailed into being an informer and suddenly HE can't even be trusted, Cristian knows that the only way Romanians will be saved is if they can be brave enough to save themselves.

Sepety's has done another great job with this historical novel. I'm entertained by interesting characters, I'm learning about a place and time period I'm unfamiliar with, this was a fast listen.  I really do sometimes forget about how absolutely horrible life was under communism for so many countries.  The fear, especially, the isolation of really never knowing who you can let your guard down with - that's a kind of exhausting that doesn't even have a word.  This book also reminds you that while the idea of revolution is thrilling - the actual act of revolution is terrifying and desperately uncertain.  You just can't even know if it's possible until you're too far gone to stop.  I'm giving it four stars because sometimes the number of rhetorical questions in Cristian's internal dialogue's questions really was too much, but overall I'm really glad I got this one from the library.