In Next-Generation Memory and Ukrainian Canadian Children’s Historical Fiction, Mateusz Świetlicki offers a stunningly comprehensive study of contemporary, English-language literature for children by Ukrainian Canadians—namely, some forty-one texts published between 1991 and 2021, representing a wide range of genres (picture books, short stories, novels, novellas). Director of the Center for Young People’s Literature and Culture at the University of Wrocɫaw, Świetlicki recently co-edited Navigating Children’s Literature Through Controversy: Global and Transnational Perspectives (Brill 2023), as well as special issues of the European Journal of American Studies (Memory, Identity, Belonging: Narratives of Eastern and Central European Presence in North America, 2023) and Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature (War and Displacement in Children’s Literature, 2023). With Next-Generation Memory, his first monograph, Świetlicki cements his position as an authority on diasporic writing for children and young adults. This book not only makes obvious its author’s deft skills in textual analysis and the mobilization of literary theory (postcolonial, feminist, and queer theory included), it also demonstrates his familiarity (despite the fact that he is not Ukrainian Canadian himself) with key debates that inform scholarly and public discourse on Canadian history and literature and Ukrainian Canadian history and literature.

Świetlicki departs from the astute observation that although Ukrainian Canadian literature has been studied by some Canadian and international scholars over the past 30-odd years, the “status of Ukrainian Canadian literature and the scholarship around it” remains “marginal” (17); “works for younger readers,” moreover, as he correctly states, have not been met with scholarly recognition commensurate with either their intellectual value or “popularity with readers and critics alike” (17). Next-Generation Memory, then, seeks to fill glaring gaps in academic conversations about Ukrainian literature produced in the Canadian context. As Świetlicki describes it, his monograph’s raison d’etre hinges on the notion that “reading, imagining, and reimagining history can lead to the formation of beyond-textual next-generation memory” (n.p.). At its core, the book argues—both elegantly and convincingly—for the vital role of children’s literature in “preventing the symbolic seeds of memory from withering” (n.p.).

Bookended by an autobiographical preface (in which Świetlicki movingly foregrounds his personal history as a motivation for undertaking the project) and an equally poignant conclusion (textured by thoughtful reflection on the war in Ukraine), Next-Generation Memory comprises five chapters that address the “entangled social relations between Ukrainian Canadians, non-Canadian Ukrainians, and non-Ukrainian Canadians, including First Nations, and other immigrants from Eastern Europe, especially Poles, German, Mennonites, and Jews” (15). With such compelling titles as “Land of All Colors and Races?: Canadian Cossacks, Indigenous Peoples, and the Myth of the Founding Fathers of the Prairies” and “Survivors, Oppressors, Implicated Subjects, and Entangled Bystanders: The Second World War and the Holocaust,” Świetlicki’s first three chapters attend to narratives about Canadian Ukrainian history, some of which engage with the complex relationships between Indigenous peoples and Ukrainians, and the internment of Ukrainian Canadians during World War I. The book’s last two chapters examine stories more sharply focused on fraught chapters of Ukrainian history—in particular, the Holodomor and WWII.

Świetlicki’s methodology marries close analysis of individual texts with detailed discussion of their historical/sociopolitical contexts and each chapter is textured with spot-on references to multi-disciplinary scholarship/theory related to his subject matter. Too numerous to itemize here (Świetlicki provides a full list in his bibliographic appendix), the author’s primary texts include literary works by Mary Borsky, Gloria Kupchenko Frolick, Janice Kulyk Keefer, Laura Langston, Barbara Smucker, and Larry Warwaruk. Discussions of the substantial oeuvres of Gabriele Goldstone and Marion Mutala are included. Importantly, and at long last, Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch’s (prolific, award-winning, and critically-acclaimed) corpus of writing for children and young adults receives the dedicated scholarly attention that it so richly deserves. Świetlicki’s savvy analyses of these and other writers’ extensive contributions to Ukrainian Canadian children’s literature, specifically, and Ukrainian Canadian literature, more generally, renders Next-Generation Memory essential reading for scholars who work in the specific field of Ukrainian Canadian literary studies; the book, however, to the credit of its author, will appeal to any avid reader of writing (especially diasporic writing) for young audiences.

Without a doubt, Świetlicki’s undertaking was laborious, but his prose is far from labored: erudite yet accessible, the author’s writing style marries sophistication and clarity. Insofar as Next-Generation Memory delivers precisely what it promises (more, in fact), the book has every reason to spark—or, rather, “sprout”—long overdue dialogue and debate about writers for children/young adults who endeavor to keep memory and history alive among their readers.