Reading Journal 2023: The Lost Year

Reading Journal 2023: The Lost Year
Author: Katherine Marsh

The folks over at the Currently Reading podcast often talk about the dreams and hopes of finding that book that is “un-put-downable”. We are free to create words where it matters, and such a word helps to capture that magicable moment when you do come across one of those books. For me, The Lost Year was one of those books.

The writing here is simple, but it is also perfectly constructed, allowing the sum of its parts to be firing on all cyylinders. The characters are all easy to care for and richly accessible, the flow of the book utilizes its mix of drama and mystery and history and everyday huumanness to generate a genuine page turning experience. Perhaps most important is that this same authenticity leads to a genuine emotional resonance balanced with just the right amount of larger themes. The book is not so much profound as it is smartly rendered and intuitively felt, and even for that matter timely.

The book’s central character is Matthew, a young boy living in the middle of Covid lockdowns, seperated from his father, a reporter now stranded overseas with the shutdown of flights, and struggling with what he sees as his overbearing mother at home. After he gets his game system taken away, his only solace in a time of isolation, he turns his attention to the other person stuck in their house- his great granmother, a 100 year old woman named Nadiya who also exists under the watchful eye of the young boys mother.

As the young boy connects with his GG, secrets from her, and his, past begin to emerge. It is here that we are introduced to the main figures whom will frame the book’s jumping back and forth in time. Helen lives in the 1930’s in Brookyln, New York, having immigrated there from Ukraine. Mila lives at the same time in Kiev during what we now know as Holodomor. A younger Nadiya enters both of their lives as a witness to the very realities the Soviet governement was covering up. What the young boy living in 2020 ends up encountering is Nadiya’s story, a story that up until this moment had yet to be told. This requires Matthew to learn about history he had never been taught, to learn about his heritage that he knew very little about, and to have to dig for answers to his questions given Nadiya’s resistance to telling the story. What sparks it all is the discovery of a picture. This is where the deteective work comes in, allowing Marsh to make some nice narrative connections between Matthew and his reporter dad. Marsh also makes some nice connections between the nature of disinformation, using the international reporting to shed light on how we often we become captive to narratives that gain power in their isolation and in their blinding effects.

If you see the image on the cover of the book, this image becomes a thematic touch point that emerges right in the middle of the book, holding both sides of the inevitable arc of this story within some larger thematic interests. One of those is the contasting pictures of faith (in God, or in something) and the suffering realities that shape our world. Closely tied to this is the relationship between hope and cynicism. How do we make sense of the stuff of this world, and how do we tell our stories, and tell eachothers stories, in ways that find its meaning? For each of these characters we find an element of a world they once thought being drastically overturned by a different reality they must now confront. This seeds uncertainty, to be sure, but it also becomes the driving force for seeking some form of necessary grounding. And it is that grounding that becomes the seedbed for the interconnecteddness of these stories,

Marsh writes with such clarity and precision, and one of the areas this rewards is the book’s real sense of place and culture. Having spent a small bit of time in Kyiv myself, I found her description of the streets and the setting to bring back all sorts of memories. I knew them visually in my minds eye, and Marsh brought all of that vividness and beauty straight back to the surface, captured with a real sense of reverance and care. This is of course contrasted with the backdrop of the soviet era coloring this beauty with equal notes of tragedy, and that brought to mind my own traversing of this space right after the war broke out in Maidan Nezalezhnosti. Equal parts beauty and tragedy coexisting.

Definitley a book of the year for me. A prefect read to bridge that gap between Halloween and rememberance day, timely given everything going on in Ukraine today, and a timeless read that is as entertaining as it is important and meaningful simply on the level of its human concerns.