Recipe for a War

7 hrs. 3 min.

Children's Books, Audio Fairy Tales & Poems

Language Russian

Author Pavel Vereshchagin

Narrator Pavel Vereshchagin

Description

There is no place on earth more beautiful than Milhenburg. For centuries, on the left bank they brew delicious chocolate, while on the right they bake the tastiest waffles. Competition between “waffle people” and “chocolate people” is an old tradition, and all residents—half-jokingly, half-seriously—keep it.

But one day, a stranger appeared on the “waffle” side. A talented teacher, Dorothea Nansen, quickly charmed the schoolchildren. Only a few lessons—and the teenagers can’t be recognized. Now they are the Warriors of the Iron Fist: energetic, collected, single-minded. They march in step to the beat of drums, and their hearts beat in unison… But every warrior needs an enemy. And the rivalry between confectioners stops being a joke—young Julie now has an increasingly dangerous time crossing the bridge to her beloved Jean-Jacques…

Laureate of the Krapivinsky Prize Pavel Vereshchagin, in the novel “Recipe for One War,” recreates the life of a fictional Milhenburg in the smallest details, making the city feel completely real and its inhabitants like our good acquaintances. The more terrifying, then, it becomes to watch gymnastics turn into marching, and rivalry turn into war. And Julie and Jean-Jacques’s feelings will seem familiar to older school-aged readers: just as lovers recognized themselves in Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, Henry and the blessed Margaret. As events unfold, the author’s observations intensify the reader’s amazement, and the novel turns into a wise parable.

The heroes of the “Teenager N” series are close to readers from 13 years old. In these books, characters realize—sometimes with interest, sometimes with joy, and sometimes with horror—that the world is far more complex than it seemed to them in childhood. And in this complexity there are new opportunities and new discoveries.