brandypainter 's review for:

The Lost Year by Katherine Marsh

5.0

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This is a book about the 1933 famine in Ukraine told in alternating perspectives from Mila, the daughter of a Soviet bureaucrat in Kyiv in 1933, Helen, the daughter of a Ukrainian immigrant in New York City in 1933, and Matthew, a boy in 202o helping look after his GG at the beginning of the Covid lockdown. The alternating points of view keep the reader engaged and guessing at where the story is going to go next. Despite changing perspectives, all three voices are clearly defined, giving depth and growth to all three characters. As a reader, I completely felt the emotions all three were going through. Marsh does an excellent job of presenting her 13 year old characters as fully rounded people. She also writes them highly sympathetically. Even though as an adult I understood Matthew's parents, I found myself just as angry with them as he did at times. The story is excellent though it is rather on the nose in a couple of places; I'm not going to complain about it being didactic though as I am well aware the lessons are some that currently need to be explicitly stated.