The Lost Year by Katherine Marsh opens with a thirteen-year-old boy called Mathew arranging boxes for her great-grandmother, who has moved in to stay with them at the height of COVID-19 in 2020. Ther 2020 is the worst for Mathew because he is more isolated and bored. For instance, there is a lockdown, and he cannot go to school to interact with his friends. The situation worsens because Mathew's journalist father is stuck in Paris due to the lockdown. Mathew wishes his father was around to take him shopping and playing, but everyone is required to stay at home, unless when shopping for essential goods and services.
Mathew's role during the COVID-19 pandemic is to take good care of his 100-year-old great-grandmother because she is the most vulnerable in the family. Mathew's mother directs him to help unpack his great-grandmother's boxes and ensure everything in the room.
While unpacking the grandmother's boxes, Mathew locates a tattered black-and-white photo. Mathew looks at the black-and-white photo and discovers that it has a hidden chapter of the grandmother's past about the family. Grandmother has kept this secret from the rest of the family because she never wanted anybody to know the misery she went through in the 1930s. When Mathew discusses the photo with his grandmother, he learns that millions died in 1932 due to a horrific Ukrainian famine that lasted for almost a decade. During the famine, Grandmother's family members starved to death. The Soviet government covered up the calamity that befell the country and ensured no data about the deaths was made public until to date.
Marsh shifts the narrative to Mila and Helen. Mila is a fortunate daughter of a Communalist party Member, and Helen is a daughter of Ukrainian immigrants living in Brooklyn. While in Brooklyn, Helen receives a letter from her starving cousins in Ukraine due to a horrific famine that has ravaged the country, and millions of people are dying. On the other hand, Mila meets a starving girl in Kyiv who says she is her cousin. Mila discovers that people are suffering under Papa Stalin’s regime, but the government does not want to address the issue.
In conclusion, Katherine Marsh intertwines the past and the present using alternating viewpoints of Mathew, Mila and Helen to bring out an emotionally powerful history of the horrific famine that killed millions of people in Ukraine in 1932. Katherine Marsh also gives a vivid description of the events of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and its consequences for Mathew and other characters.
