The Lost Year: A Survival Story of the Ukrainian Famine

Katherine Marsh's The Lost Year: A Survival Story of the Ukrainian Famine is a moving family mystery for 10 year olds about a boy in lockdown who finds a photo his great-grandmother wanted thrown away.

What happens

It's spring 2020. Matthew is thirteen and stuck at home in New Jersey. School is on screens, his dad is working in Paris and can't get back, and Mum has brought his hundred-year-old great-grandmother to live with them, to keep her safe from Covid. Not even a friend is allowed in the garden.

Matthew mostly wants to finish his video game. Then he accidentally shoots an arrow at GG's drink (she laughs, which surprises everyone) and loses his games console for two weeks. His punishment is helping her sort through her old boxes.

At first it's the good kind of surprise. GG was a champion bowler! She gives Matthew her pin and coaches his throw from her bed. But one box holds a faded photo of two girls. One is GG. The other is called Helen. GG cries and orders him out. Later she tells him there were three girls, not two, then refuses to say another word.

The book moves between Matthew and two girls in 1932. Mila lives in Kyiv with her father, an important Communist Party man. She's been taught to love Stalin and to believe the hungry people pouring in from the countryside are lying. Helen lives in Brooklyn and is locked in a battle of wills with her strict dad over a cold cabbage roll.

How those lives link up is the mystery, and it pulls you along. Matthew starts out grumpy and bored and missing his dad, and then suddenly he's asking his journalist dad how to get someone to open up.

The title tells you where the story is heading. It's about the Holodomor, the famine in Ukraine in the 1930s when millions of people died. The opening chapters only set it up, so they don't show how hard the later ones get. What you do see early on is a story about a boy murdered by his own family, told to Mila as a hero's tale, and people talking about typhus. GG has also told Mum she'd rather die than be a burden. It's a lot to carry for a sensitive reader.

For a reader who's ready for it, it's a gripping way into a piece of history your reader may never have heard of.

What to read next

Nowhere Boy, by the same author, also shows big world events landing on children. A fourteen-year-old from Syria crosses the sea to Europe, and an American boy in Brussels finds out he's starting at a French-speaking school.