Lana Stasek doesn't write to please. She writes like she's peeling skin off old wounds - her own and everyone else's. This isn't a polite scrapbook of dates and places. It's a memory under a spotlight, family laid bare, the invisible debts no one ever asked for but everyone drags around. If you're here for comfort, wrong book. What you'll find is recognition - the kind that stings first, heals later.
Voices Within: Life Before and After doesn't play nice. Dreams aren't fairy escapes - they're x-rays, showing what the body already knows but the mind keeps locked up. Immigration isn't a victory parade. It's freedom with a price tag: exhaustion, humiliation, endless reinvention. Even sunlight through a borrowed window feels like rebellion when the rest of your life screams dependence.
And the dark? It's here, too. A cold mother. Soviet brutality. Silence that turned into armor - and into a weapon. Sometimes that silence blew outward, turning her into the kid who bullied others. Not many admit this. She does. Because cruelty never just disappears. It circles back, like a boomerang - maybe not to the same hand, but always close enough to cut.
Every insult here is a study in power. Every neglect, a test: is pain passed down, or does each generation manufacture its own fresh supply? Nothing is random. The abandoned dog, the watered-down milk, the petty betrayals - they're not accidents. They're the blueprint of a world where survival often means repeating the very violence you swore to end. Illness and loss aren't blind fate either. They're echoes. Consequences. The unpaid bill.
And yet this book isn't just a diagnosis. It's a fight. Between graves and bureaucrats, there's laughter - sharp, survival laughter. Not because it's funny, but because silence would kill faster. This is a book about refusing to vanish. About standing knee-deep in the ruins and still saying: here I am.
Voices Within isn't tragedy, though scars run through it. It isn't nostalgia, though it looks back. It's truth dragged into the open - a witnessing that won't let silence stay cheap, won't let wounds be forgotten, won't let a single voice, once found, ever go unheard.
Borodavka, Vladyslava: - Vladyslava Borodavka immigrated to the United States with her parents at the age of eight and graduated from Loyola University Chicago in 2020. She is the English adaptation editor and translator of her mother Lana Stasek's memoirs. Her first published translation is Voices Within: Family Chronicles (2025).
Stasek, Lana: - "Lana Stasek is a Ukrainian-born American writer. She came to the U.S. with two children and zero English, built a business, and in 2024 began writing. Her memoirs are not polite stories for polite shelves but raw, rule-breaking narratives that weave humor through pain and slice silence open with sarcasm. With family dementia as a haunting backdrop, she writes to preserve memory with honesty sharp enough to sting and irony that refuses to sit quietly. Her books - Voices Within: Family Chronicles and Life Before and After - confront trauma, immigration, and survival with wit, philosophy, and the pulse of generations."
