Kinderland
SynopsisPlot
With her parents gone in search of work, twelve-year-old Cristina must act as a mother to her two younger brothers. Through her eyes, we experience the feeling of wonderment and loneliness as they roam the streets of a contemporary Moldovan village. Her mother has gone to Italy, her father to Siberia, and the children grow up fast, imitating the gestures of the absent adults, and chasing their fading memories of normal family life.
Story
About this book
Kinderland follows twelve-year-old Cristina, who lives in a Moldovan village where many adults have left to find work abroad. Her mother has gone to Italy, her father to Siberia, and Cristina is left to care for her two younger brothers. The novel is narrated through her perspective as she tries to fill the role of a parent while still being a child herself.
Cristina and her brothers drift through their village, mimicking the habits and routines of the grown-ups who are no longer there. Their daily life is shaped by a quiet tension between independence and abandonment, between the freedom of unsupervised days and duties no child should carry. Memories of ordinary family life fade slowly, and the children build their own version of normality from what remains.
Liliana Corobca, a Moldovan-born author also known for The Censor's Notebook, sets the story in present-day Moldova, where labor migration has reshaped whole communities. Across Eastern Europe and Central Asia, many children grow up with one or both parents working in distant countries. Cristina is fictional, but the circumstances she navigates are common in the region.
