Winner of the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction
Finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction
One woman’s story of her unusual life, from a childhood spent constantly on the move, to becoming enmeshed in a cult-like communist organization at sixteen, unaware of the darkness that awaited her.
Sonja Larsen’s is a childhood in which family members come and go and where freedom is both a gift and a burden. Trying to escape the instability, searching for a sense of family and belonging, she arrives in Brooklyn at sixteen, and is soon drawn into an organization known publicly as the National Labor Federation and privately as the Communist Party USA Provisional Wing. Eager to prove herself, Sonja spends the next three years at the organization’s national headquarters working sixteen-hour days. Catching the attention of the Old Man, the organization’s charismatic leader, Sonja is made one of his “special girls,” as well as the youngest member of the organization’s militia and part of its inner circle. But even as she and her comrades count down the days until the dawning of their new American revolution, Sonja’s doubts about the cause and the Old Man become increasingly difficult to ignore. Unique, award-winning, and searing in detail, Red Star Tattoo explores the seductions and dangers of extremism, and asks what it takes to survive a childhood scarred by loss, abuse, and the sometimes violent struggle for belonging.