In the pre-dawn moments of February 24, 2022, Oceanheart and her husband were “jolted awake” by the sound of explosions in their city of Dnipro, in eastern Ukraine. A call to her mother confirmed the author’s “worst fears”: War had begun. “War feels like a relic of history or a plot in a movie,” Oceanheart writes, and she and her family struggle with their new reality. While she had previously spent her days studying for a master’s degree in psychology, identifying the best pediatricians for her daughters, and watching Downton Abbey, Oceanheart’s priorities abruptly shifted to fulfilling basic human needs—competing with neighbors for “scarce food supplies” and filling her bathtub with water for doing dishes and flushing the toilet. Initially, Oceanheart invited her mother and younger brother to shelter in their two-bedroom apartment to escape the worsening danger in their hometown of Bakhmut. Eventually, her father joined them, but the strain of wartime cohabitation provoked a painful rift between the families. Later, Oceanheart and her husband, Artur, make the difficult decision to move to the United States, where they can stay for two years under “humanitarian parole.” Although the author’s prose can feel overly formal at times, and the dialogue can be somewhat stilted, the memoir’s strength lies in its intimate domestic details. Rather than focusing on military movements or geopolitical explanations, Oceanheart captures small moments: entertaining children in the dark during nightly blackouts meant to avoid becoming bombing targets, and her daughters’ terror at firecrackers during their first Fourth of July celebration in North Carolina. Particularly affecting is her heartbreak at realizing that the war “had woven itself into the fabric of their childhood.”
