When young Yurii asked why his father no longer lived at home, there was no ready answer. His father had joined the army, burned buildings and shattered bridges appeared outside the car window, and adult words — mobilization, occupation, front line — explained almost nothing to a small child.
His mother, psychologist Alina Otzemko, began writing a story through her son’s eyes. Why Isn’t Dad at Home? describes uniforms, long absences, telephone calls and visits to places without toys, but filled with flashlights, weapons and the constant expectation that a parent will soon leave again.
When the manuscript was nearly finished, Otzemko asked her husband to write the foreword. He never had the chance. He was killed on June 7, 2024, forcing her to search for an entirely different vocabulary — not for temporary absence, but for death, a funeral and a promise to return that could never be fulfilled.
According to Daycom’s earlier analysis, this family’s experience captures a much broader transformation in Ukrainian children’s literature. Books are no longer simply a refuge from reality. They have become mediators in conversations that parents fear but can no longer avoid.
Otzemko’s second book, Why Did Dad Die?, is built around questions children often ask after a loss. Can the dead come back? Can someone call them in heaven? Why do other fathers return from the front while mine does not?
The book is written for children, but it also serves adults who must deliver news they can barely bear themselves. Its short sentences and gentle images provide a structure for conversations in which grief often leaves parents without language.
Since the full-scale invasion began, Ukraine has produced nearly 200 children’s books about the war. They have been written by psychologists, teachers, veterans, service members and parents, often with input from specialists in childhood trauma.
«Чому помер тато?» — Книга
The scale is difficult to compare with earlier literary responses to conflict. These are not retrospective books written after the violence has ended. They are being published during an ongoing war for children who still hear sirens, sleep in shelters and wait for relatives serving at the front.
The surge reflects more than the duration of the invasion. Many Ukrainian parents now understand the cost of silence. Generations raised under Soviet rule often inherited fear, grief and family trauma without ever being told where those emotions came from.
Today’s parents are trying not to repeat that pattern. A child who has seen a destroyed apartment is not told that nothing serious happened. The child is told that fear is normal, that adults are afraid too and that the war is real — but not the child’s fault.
That is the logic behind Yevheniia Zavalii’s Rocket the Raccoon and Other Heroes. Its animals experience shelling, displacement and separation. One story follows a lion who hides his fear because he believes strength means never being frightened.
The animal creates a safe distance. A child may not be ready to speak about trembling during an explosion, but can talk about the frightened lion. Once the emotion has a name, it becomes something that can be shared rather than stored silently.
A book cannot remove trauma, and it cannot replace professional support. Its role is smaller but fundamental: it gives a family a common language from which a difficult conversation can begin.
War enters these books through more than death. It appears in changing schools, hurried evacuations, temporary homes, absent friends, nighttime walks to shelters and the sudden interruption of ordinary life by an air-raid alert.
«Битва за місто» — Книга
Volodymyr Chernishenko’s Battle for the City addressed the central question of February 2022: how does a parent explain that a war has begun? A peaceful city is attacked by menacing military machines, while a fighter aircraft known as Ghost rises to defend it.
The reference to the Ghost of Kyiv turns the early chaos of the invasion into a moral structure a child can follow. There is a home, an aggressor, a defender and a price for rescue.
The hero saves the city but is eventually destroyed. That tragic ending gives parents a path from the fantasy of victory toward a conversation about real soldiers who die while protecting others.
This directness distinguishes much of Ukraine’s new children’s literature from older traditions in which death was hidden behind euphemism. Telling a young child that someone has “gone to sleep forever” may create confusion, fear of sleep or the expectation that the dead person will wake up.
Otzemko’s books use the word death. They do so through repetition, simple images and gradual recognition. The child is not given an elaborate philosophical explanation, but permission to understand only part of the truth at a time.
In Nataliia Cheredniuk’s Ommm: The Spirit of the Irpin Forest, the Russian assault is seen through a magical guardian who summons water and wind to protect the town.
For children in Irpin, this is not an abstract setting. They recognize a place that endured occupation, destruction and the killing of civilians. Fantasy does not deny what happened; it makes the memory bearable.
«Битва за місто» — Книга
A child cannot control a missile or an army. A child can imagine a protective spirit. That figure restores a small measure of order in a world where even adults cannot always guarantee safety.
These books are also changing the idea of childhood itself. Soldiers, combat medics, deminers, volunteers and veterans now appear alongside animals and magical figures. Air-defense systems, drones, missiles and body armor have entered the vocabulary of primary-school readers.
Oleksandr Mykhed’s Little Travel Book: Armed Forces of Ukraine introduces children to military equipment, the role of women in the armed forces, operations against Russia’s Black Sea Fleet and the lives of veterans.
A page about prosthetics and postwar recovery may sit next to an illustration explaining different classes of drones. The book reflects the society children actually see, where disability, military service and advanced weapons are no longer distant subjects.
For some parents, such knowledge is a form of patriotic education. It can also restore a sense of protection. Learning about Patriot systems allows a child to understand that an air raid involves not only incoming missiles, but also people and technology trying to stop them.
Yet this creates a difficult boundary between explaining wartime reality and militarizing childhood. A seven-year-old who can identify a missile by sound demonstrates remarkable adaptation, but also the abnormality of the environment that made such knowledge necessary.
A book about the armed forces can teach respect without turning war into a game. The difference lies in whether it shows only impressive machinery or also exhaustion, injury, fear, responsibility and the long life that follows military service.
«Чому помер тато?» — Книга
The strongest books avoid glorifying violence. They show waiting, mutual care, medical evacuation, the return of veterans and the consequences of combat. Heroism is presented not as love of war, but as the defense of people who want peace.
This matters especially for military families. Their children live with conflicting emotions: pride in a parent’s service, anger at the parent’s absence, fear of telephone calls and envy toward families in which everyone is still at home.
Literature allows those emotions to exist together. A child can love a father in uniform and resent him for leaving. A child can feel proud and still wish he would never return to the front.
Psychologically, the crucial message is that none of those feelings is wrong. Children do not need to perform courage for adults who are uncomfortable with their grief.
The books also treat bereavement as a process rather than a single moment. Yurii initially refuses to believe his mother because his father had promised to return.
Later, he watches another child reunite with a father coming home from the front. Only then does he begin to understand that his own father will not walk through the door.
That scene explains why the phrase “he will always live in your heart” cannot be the first answer. Before a symbolic bond can be formed, the child must grasp the physical reality: the dead person will not return, call or come home.
«Ракета, єнот та інші герої» — Книга
For Otzemko, writing became a way to organize her own grief. For readers, the book turns one family’s loss into a recognizable path through disbelief, questions, anger, funeral rituals, longing and a new relationship with memory.
This is why these books are also manuals for adults. Parents often delay the conversation because they fear causing additional pain. In doing so, they may leave children alone with fantasies more frightening than the truth.
War has made the children’s book part of an informal mental-health system. It enters the home before a psychologist does, remains after the conversation ends and allows the same subject to be revisited as many times as necessary.
But books cannot work alone. Schools, libraries, teachers and caregivers need to know how to use them. A badly framed story about death can overwhelm a child, while an overly heroic story can teach children to hide fear because only bravery appears acceptable.
A trauma-informed approach does not prescribe a response. A child may cry, remain silent, change the subject or ask a practical question that seems emotionally detached. Each reaction may be part of understanding what has been heard.
Ukrainian publishers are producing this literature while the country’s cultural infrastructure is itself under attack. Russian strikes have destroyed printing facilities, warehouses and large numbers of books, including editions intended for children.
Continuing to publish under those conditions is another form of resistance. Russia has tried to deprive Ukrainian children of safety, home and a predictable future. A book cannot rebuild an apartment or bring back a parent, but it can preserve the language needed to describe what was lost.
These works are also shaping national memory before the war has ended. Today’s children will remember the invasion not only through textbooks and official ceremonies, but through stories read in bed while sirens sounded outside.
That gives authors an unusual responsibility. Patriotism must not erase emotional complexity, and hope must not become a promise that no adult can guarantee.
Children do not need a polished version of the war. They need the truth presented within the limits of what they can understand and endure.
The most important achievement of Ukraine’s new children’s literature lies in that restraint. It does not tell children there is nothing to fear. It tells them that fear is normal, loss is painful, difficult questions are allowed and an adult should remain nearby to listen.
When Yurii asks why his father is not at home, the book cannot bring him back. It can do something else: prevent silence from becoming a second loss — one in which a child is deprived not only of a parent, but also of the words needed to understand grief.
