Katherine Marsh’s 2023 novel, The Lost Year, opens with an intense attack against the legendary video game princess, Zelda. It is the year of Covid and quarantine. This part of the story will be almost too intensely familiar with many young readers. Not every personal experience with Covid-19 is the same, but it is assuredly a shared experience capable of uniting people all around the world in a way that has not been experienced since the Great Depression bled into World War II. And that period in history is where another section of the novel takes place.
Also making this historical setting of the book relevant to today’s younger readers to whom the novel is targeted is that it takes place in Ukraine. That is a country that, at the time this book was published, could be heard every day due to the Russian invasion and that country’s admirable resistance.
The story is split into dual narratives. One follows thirteen-year-old Matthew dealing with the Covid-imposed quarantine in 2020. While forced indoors and undergoing a massive lifestyle change, he grows closer to his great-grandmother, GG. The effort to utilize the pandemic’s restrictions on normality for positive purposes rather than allowing it to become a wasted opportunity is the story of Matthew’s family attempting to pull him away from video games. The result is that Matthew assists GG in sorting through the story of her life which is symbolically and literally expressed through boxes of belongings. Those items stimulate GG’s memories which throws the story back in time to its other narrative thread which is the story of Helen and Mila, family ancestors dealing with, not coincidentally, Ukrainians battling Russian oppression. In this case, of course, Russia was known as the Soviet Union.
Matthew’s present-day story ultimately ties to the story set in the 1930s through its explication of one of many very dark chapters in the history of the Soviet Union. The novel conveys the story of what became known in Ukraine as the Holodomor: a genocidal famine that claimed the lives of untold numbers of Ukrainian citizens at the express order of the dictatorial ruler of the Soviet Union, referred to here as “Papa” Stalin.
The central thematic spine of the story which connects the two disparate limbs is the power of information and its dangerous opposite, disinformation. The story of the Holodomor long went untold because the Soviet Union leadership conspired to cover it up. The book implicitly asks whether history really happened if it is never told. The logical answer, of course, is yes, but when it comes to actively suppressing history with concerted disinformation, logic fails to apply. Matthew comes to learn how life in an oppressive regime is constructed from the outside. The news and information and facts that Helen and Mila get from the Soviet propaganda machine becomes the truth. Matthew learns from history as well as what is taking place around him in real-time that when something becomes the truth for some people, all the evidence in the world that runs to the contrary will never change their minds.
Matthew is having a conversation with his journalist father about the inexplicable illogic of such a situation by telling him he has learned that Stalin “pretended everything was going great, that there was no famine. People — especially in other parts of the country — believed him. It’s crazy!”
His father responds by reminding Matthew to simply look around him and see “what’s happening now. At least ten thousand people have died of Covid in New York City, but there are still a lot of Americans who think Covid is a myth or some government conspiracy to take away their freedom.”
At this point, Matthew’s thoughts turn to “Mila. Face-to-face with GG, an actual victim, she still denied the truth.”
This disconnect between belief in falsehoods even when confronted with facts that proving them wrong is the essential core of the book. It is the thing that unites the dual narrative threads. It is the thing which connects a distant past in a world barely looks recognizable to younger people with the world those same young people can remember quite clearly. The literary device upon which these two stories become a dramatic conflict is the revelation of a dark family secret that has gone untold for almost a century. The revelation of this secret also goes toward analyzing the seemingly simple answer to the question of whether history really happened if the story is never told. The secret that Matthew learns about his family is one that serves to make question far more difficult to answer than it would seem.
