In the April 16 issue of the New York Sun Benjamin Lytal takes a look at The White King:

“Though the episodes that make up “The White King” all share an atmosphere of deprivation and cruelty, the novel is both more and less than a story of life under communism. Mr. Dragomán is chiefly interested in the effects of such a life on a boy. He shows us how a boy’s psychology can assimilate sudden, abysmal realizations — that his father is a political prisoner, for example — while the child remains, at his core, a normal boy. He begins to understand the depths of dishonesty and perversion around him — and he also begins to understand sex. Mr. Dragomán’s narrator, the young Djata, shows that childhood can seldom be completely engulfed by tyranny — that toy soldiers always persist outside reality, in their own enduring universe.”

For the full piece go here.