Marvelous Middle Grade Monday
The Lost Year (Roaring Brook Press, 2023) by Katherine Marsh is a really good historical about the Holodomor (the Ukraine famine tragedy in the 1930s), and is also set at the beginning of the 2020 pandemic. With Ukraine and Russia and immigration being in the news, this book is very timely. The story is told in multiple points of view.
It’s the pandemic and thirteen-year-old Matthew’s reporter father is in France and can’t come home. All Matthew can do is online school, help Mom with his great grandmother, and not see his friends or go anywhere. When Mom takes away his Switch, she makes him help GG sort out the boxes in her room. It’s not easy going, since GG periodically tells him to “get out,” but as he starts learning family history, secrets are revealed.
We meet three cousins: Nadiya, Mila, and Helen.
This book was inspired by Marsh’s own family history and is a National Book Award Finalist, a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the 21st Century, Winner of the Jane Addams, Golden Kite and New York Historical Society Awards and on 28 state lists. I hope you get to read it.
Here’s a video about Katherine’s family. Read about the author here and see her other books here. I’ve read two of her books before and see others I need to read.
In some ways there are so many books written about Nazi Germany and the holocaust that one might think, how can there be another? But Kathryn Lasky has done it well with Ashes (Viking, 2010). The book gives a view into what was happening before much of the world was aware of the looming danger.