Swimming with Spies: Behind the Book Interview

In the spring of 2014, a marine biologist's daughter in Sevastopol watched her city change hands almost overnight — and the dolphins her father had spent years training suddenly became assets in a war she was too young to have chosen.

That single true detail — Ukraine's military dolphins, seized and repurposed after Russia's annexation of Crimea — became the spine of Swimming with Spies, the new middle grade novel from Chrystyna Lucyk-Berger. Chrystyna has spent her career writing historical fiction for adults, much of it set in Ukraine during the Second World War. This book asked something different of her: could she tell a story about a war that was, in her own words, still happening — and could she tell it to children?

I sat down with her for Behind the Book to find out what it took to say yes.

The Story Behind the Story

Chrystyna traces the book back to a specific week in February 2022. When Russia invaded Ukraine, she found herself glued to the news almost around the clock — a month after losing her grandmother, who had always hoped her family would never have to live through what she had. Chrystyna, who is Ukrainian American, watched history repeat itself in real time and realized she could no longer write about the Second World War the way she once had.

That same instinct led her back to the page when Scholastic came to her, aware of her earlier World War II novels set in Ukraine, looking for someone to write about the current conflict for young readers. They handed her three pieces — a girl named Sofiya, a pod of dolphins, the city of Sevastopol — and a choice: write the story as contemporary fiction, or set it during the 2014 annexation and classify it as historical.

For adult readers, historical fiction usually means several decades of distance. For children's books, Chrystyna learned, the rules are different — and more recent events can still carry the label. She saw the advantage immediately: framed as historical fiction, the book had staying power a ripped-from-the-headlines story wouldn't. And she'd already been deep in the research anyway. She knew about Sevastopol's real dolphinarium, and how its dolphins — trained for military use since the Soviet era — had been seized and repurposed after the 2014 annexation, some used to guard harbors, plant mines, or serve, in effect, as spies. The premise wasn't invented. It was waiting for her.

The Emotional Core

At the center of the book is Sofiya, whose Russian mother left for Moscow three years before the story begins, and whose closest childhood friendship has curdled into open hostility. Ilya, the boy she grew up with, is now Russian-aligned, his father a military colonel — and when the annexation reaches the dolphinarium where Sofiya's father works, it's the two fathers who end up facing each other down. What follows is less a war story than a story about communication: about a girl and a boy on opposite sides of a divide neither of them chose, trying to find their way back to doing the right thing.

Chrystyna was just as deliberate about the Ukraine surrounding Sofiya. Researching the book alongside the real war unfolding around her, she kept noticing details that pushed back against a tired assumption — that Eastern Europe is somehow behind the times. A soldier practicing yoga in front of a bombed-out building. Vegetarian Cossacks. Teenagers with tangled, modern, post-Soviet family trees — Russian parents, Ukrainian parents, Tatar parents, foreign-born neighbors, all layered together. She built that texture directly into the book: Sofiya's father is a vegetarian; a Cossack character runs a fish taco stand. Small, specific, true-to-life details, chosen so young readers would recognize a Ukraine that looks a lot like their own mixed, modern world — not a distant or unfamiliar one.

Research & Immersion

Some of the book's richest material came from a marine mammal researcher Chrystyna worked with in Europe — someone whose first piece of advice was blunt: if this was going to end like Free Willy, she wasn't interested in helping. It wouldn't. From there, the collaboration led Chrystyna to real research on dolphin communication, including a Hawaii-based study teaching dolphins sign language, and to a harder truth about the animals she'd fallen in love with: they can be surprisingly nasty to each other. They're not gentle symbols. They're animals, focused on survival, same as anyone else in the story.

Chrystyna got to experience some of that firsthand — playing ball with dolphins behind the scenes with her son and godchildren, and feeding them ice cubes, a detail she's saving for readers to discover in the book itself. That hands-on time shows up throughout Sofiya's own relationship with her pod, which is less a plot device than the emotional center the whole story swims around.

Chrystyna walked me through all of it — the grandmother who hoped this wouldn't happen again, the dolphinarium seized twice over, the fish-taco Cossack — in the full conversation below.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Swimming with Spies based on a true story?

Yes. Swimming with Spies is set against the real 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea, and its central premise — a dolphinarium's animals repurposed for military use — is drawn from documented history. Sevastopol's dolphins had been trained for Soviet and Russian military use since the Cold War era, including tasks like harbor patrol and mine detection. Chrystyna Lucyk-Berger built Sofiya's story directly on top of that real history, alongside her own research into modern Ukrainian life.

What genre is Swimming with Spies?

Swimming with Spies is historical fiction for middle grade readers, published by Scholastic for ages 8 to 12 (grades 5 to 8). It also carries real elements of a war story and an animal-rescue adventure, since the plot turns on protecting a pod of trained dolphins from being seized for military use.

How does the book handle a difficult, real-world topic for young readers?

Chrystyna doesn't soften the history, but she builds a way through it. A key figure in the book, Sofiya's teacher Miss Evette, works throughout the story to help her students — Ukrainian, Russian, and everyone caught in between — see past the political lines being drawn around them. The emotional throughline isn't the invasion itself, but whether two kids on opposite sides of it can still choose to sit at the same table and work together.

What stayed with me longest wasn't the history, though there's plenty of it. It was the dolphinarium — small, strange, entirely true — and the way Chrystyna kept circling back to it as the place where everything else in the story meets. That's the kind of research she brings to a book: specific enough to hold a reader's attention, true enough to matter.

Swimming with Spies is available now through Scholastic and your favorite bookstores. If there's a young reader, a classroom, or a library in your life that could use a story like this one, it's a worthwhile one to pass along — and if Chrystyna's adult historical fiction is more your speed, that's linked below too.