Despite the trauma of lost homes and disrupted educations, a new wave of "teen entrepreneurs" emerged from the chaos.

: To avoid looking like a suspicious gathering, they met in networks of no more than three people at a time.

: Before a single word was read, they checked every window was bolted and scanned the apartment doors for "informants" who might report them to the Russian security services. Between Duty and Destruction

While Mariika fought to preserve her culture, others her age faced darker pressures. In the northern Sumy region, Oleksandr watched his house shake from blast waves while his father served on the front lines. For teens like him, "normalcy" was a luxury found only at rare summer camps on the opposite side of the country, where for a few days, they could talk about things other than the war.

They called it "The Most Dangerous Book Club in the World." Because Ukrainian textbooks and literature had been deemed "extremist," simply owning a physical copy of a poem by Taras Shevchenko could carry a five-year prison sentence. To survive, the teens went underground:

In the quiet corners of an occupied town, seventeen-year-old Mariika and her friends lived a double life. By day, they navigated the eerie, militarized streets of their hometown, their faces neutral masks designed to draw no attention from the armed soldiers patrolling the lyceum. But by night, they engaged in a quiet, dangerous rebellion that didn't involve Molotov cocktails, but metaphors. The Clandestine Book Club