The Lost Year by Katherine Marsh
Hi my name is Kire. I am in 6th grade and I love to read. Other than reading I like to do gymnastics and play viola.
The Lost Year is a historical fiction novel that I would describe as a page-turning story about family and survival. The book is about a 13-year-old boy who lives during the Covid 19 pandemic with his great-great grandmother.
When Matthew’s Nintendo gets taken away from him, he is forced to look through old boxes that belong to Matthew’s great-great grandmother. In these old boxes he finds all sorts of things like an old photo that makes Matthew want to learn about his great-great grandmother’s past. Through photos, journals, other things, and his great-great grandmother explaining everything, Matthew slowly learns about his great-great grandmother’s crazy past. He learns that she used to live in Kyiv, Russia during the Holodomor which was a famine from 1932 to 1933 and that she had two other cousins. He also learns his great-great grandmother’s secret that she had kept to herself since 1933. I won’t reveal the secret in this review but just know that it was a crazy twist in the story that I couldn’t ever have imagined. The book is written from three perspectives: Matthew’s, Mila’s, and Helen’s. Mila and Helen are the two cousins related to Matthew’s great-great grandmother. This three-perspective writing actually added a lot that made the book more interesting to read.
I had to read this book for the Idaho Battle of the Books (IBOB) and when I first picked it up, I didn’t think that I would like it at all. However, because the book has so many twists and turns that I would never have expected, I ended up really enjoying it. I would even go as far as to say that this has been the best historical fiction book that I have ever read. Overall, I would recommend this to anyone who wants an interesting story that has some historical flavor embedded in it.
