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I Wish I Didn't Have to Tell You This
CCBC Review:
A follow-up to Yelchin’s illustrated middle grade memoir The Genius Under the Table, this chilling graphic memoir picks up a few years after Genius ends. In Cold War-era Leningrad, Yevgeny, now a young man, is an artist feeling the oppressive eyes of the KGB on his work. To avoid the military draft that would send him to Afghanistan, he finds a dreary job in Siberia designing sets for plays. He has recently lost a friend, a refusenik—a Jewish person who was refused permission to emigrate from the Soviet Union to Israel—who was likely murdered by the KGB, and has fallen in love with an American student, Libby, who wants to help Yevgeny leave the country. As punishment for draft dodging, Yevgeny is forced to undergo a nightmarish stay in a psychiatric hospital; while he has no mental illness upon his arrival, he notes that he certainly leaves with one. Bleak, atmospheric, and foreboding, Yevgeny’s fear, paranoia, and lack of freedom under the authoritarian regime are palpable throughout. Mercifully, the memoir ends with a hopeful scene, with Yevgeny on a plane to the U.S., where he will join Libby, now his wife. Yelchin’s stylized illustrations are magnificently expressive, and the moody, grayscale palette imparts an appropriately bleak feeling in a memoir whose themes of resistance and freedom of are resonant today. ©2026 Cooperative Children’s Book Center
Illustrated by Eugene Yelchin
CCBC Age Recommendation: 14 and older
Age Range:
Grades 9-12 (Age 14 and older)
Formats:
Biography, Autobiography and Memoir
Graphic Novel
Subjects:
20th Century
Art and Artists
Autobiography/Memoir
Cold War
Free Speech
Jewish People
Oppression
Russians and Russian Americans
Diversity subject:
Jewish
Publisher:
Candlewick
Publish Year: 2025
Pages: 423
ISBN: 9781536215533
CCBC Location: Non-Fiction, 741.5 Yelchin