The Lost Year by Katherine Marsh

This is a great young adult book, which juxtaposes Matthew's year of being locked down as a teen with school closed and Zoom classes because of COVID-19 with discovering his great grandmother's secret. He is living through something that he sees as hard and difficult to bear, but through GiGi he learns that when she was a girl, back in 1932 in Ukraine, there was a famine that wiped out her family. There is something great about a book that puts our current situation into perspective, and also demonstrates that Russia has been working to crush Ukraine for 100 years. Putin, walking in the shoes of Stalin, cares nothing for the people of Ukraine, they both simply want control over them, to crush their culture and their people, starving or bombing them out of existence, it matters not. Matthew and the reader learn some perspective and some history, all the while enjoying a good story well told.