When a good story with compelling characters also brings history alive for me, I am hooked. Sown in tears is such a book.

We may learn the facts about Czarist Russia in the early twentieth century – the pograms, and the devastation of Jewish communities by the Cossacks from history books, but let a writer tell the story of an individual woman, and her family – her husband killed in a raid in their small village, she’s left on her own with two children to care for and no way to survive except her strength and wits and willingness