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The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Alta Ifland on Miruna, a Tale by Bogdan Suceavă, translated by Alistair Ian Blyth and out from Twisted Spoon Press.

Fun fact! Bogdan and Chad were at MSU during the same time, where they became friends. Here’s the beginning of Alta’s review:

Miruna is a novella written in the voice of an adult who remembers the summer he (then, seven) and his sister, Miruna (then, six) spent in the Evil Vale with their grandfather (sometimes referred to as “Grandfather,” other times as “Niculae Berca”). The Evil Vale is located in the region of Wallachia (southern Romania) in the Carpathians, and is described as a place seemingly forgotten by time. In the Author’s Afterword, Bogdan Suceava explains that the remoteness of the place made it possible for its inhabitants to avoid Communist laws and to live according to an archaic way of life that was rare even for the Balkans.

In the world that is the Evil Vale, the news from the rest of the world, which comes by way of newspapers and rumors, gets tangled up, mixing fact and fiction, the real and the surreal, the past and the present. Niculae Berca spends the summer telling stories to his grandchildren, in which the family history is an outgrowth of the country’s history, and the stories of real heroes sound like the folktales whose protagonists are based on mythical characters. Facts are always contaminated by myth (or, one could say, as the author reminds us, that the myth itself is often born of a real event that happened in the distant past). Most of the stories are centered on a local character: the Welldigger; Old Woman Fira—a soothsayer who can predict the future and who, after being converted by Father Dimitire, still keeps her old ways; Father Dimitrie, who lives to be two hundred; the bandit Oarta Aman, who, after terrorizing the entire province of Wallachia, is killed by the king’s army, then comes back as a ghost to frighten and humiliate the German soldiers.

For the rest of the review, go here.