This Rebel Heart is an absorbing, atmospheric look at the Budapest student uprising of 1956, when the Soviets left Hungary for a week. The book is full of supernatural elements, which at first I thought were figurative, but ended up being a fundamental part of the story. For example, since the Soviets came, the city has lost its color. The blue sky was the last to go. People can barely remember the names of colors, and marvel when they begin to come back.

Another example is in the back story of our main character, Csilla. During the war, when the Jews were being rounded up and shot next to the river Duna that runs through Budapest, Csilla's father led their family into the river, and they lived in its waters for the rest of the war, protected from the Nazis. And now the river constantly talks to Csilla.

As the book begins, Csilla's parents were recently exonerated and reburied. Csilla's father had been important in the Communist party, but he was falsely accused of treason and Zionism and executed years before. Now he has been publicly exonerated -- but the authorities seem to have used his funeral as a cover to crack down on students at the university.

Csilla has tickets to get out of Hungary with her aunt Ilona -- her only surviving relative after the Holocaust. But despite that immanent escape, Csilla gets pulled into the cause of the rebels. She becomes friends with a young man whose lover was recently executed by the secret police for homosexuality. And starts thinking about his cause and all that is wrong with Hungary under the Soviets. And then someone leaves her father's journals at her doorstep, and she reads about his vision for Hungary. Is it even possible to right the wrongs he committed in support of that vision?

And then Csilla meets a handsome young man who tells her he is an angel of death. He is an angel of death who comes to be with children who are facing death. So why has he been pulled to Budapest?

This is an evocative novel, rich with the atmosphere of Budapest. I visited Budapest years ago, and the words of this book pulled me right back to that beautiful city, dominated by the presence of the Duna River. It was easy for me to believe the river would speak to one of her children.