“Gingerbread” by Robert Dinsdale

I don’t know how long ago I started reading this book. I have started and finished perhaps a dozen others in the meantime, maybe even more. 

So, yeah, it was slow going for me to start with, but I always intended to finish it. I just found myself reaching for a crossword puzzle more often than I reached for this book. But eventually I resigned myself to the cold and the dark and the hunger and the snow. And soon enough I found myself captured by the story. I was definitely rolling downhill with it during the second half. 

This is the story of a young boy in Belarus who lives with his mother. He is not close to his papa, her father, but the boy and his mother must go to live with him in his tenement. The boy doesn't realize it yet, but his mother is dying of cancer, and he will need someone to take care of him afterwards--and, just as much, the boy will need to care for his papa. 

Before he lived in the city, Papa used to live in a little house with Baba on the edge of the woods, and he takes the boy back there to see the place, but it is a rundown ruin. Even so, the woods are calling him back, and the boy and Papa move out of the city and into the forest. And the rest of the story teeters between fairytale and horror, with a number of well-known folk stories woven in.