Tag / kidlit

by booksoverlookedblog

Sunshine State Books: The Lost Year by Katherine Marsh

Without in any way limiting the author’s exclusive rights under copyright, any use of this publication to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited.

It took some time, but I’m back! I have lots of literary-based goals for 2026. I’ve already started one of them: The OKayest Travel Blog. I spent two weeks in Japan last fall, and I wanted to share stories about my trip. Right now there are only a couple posts, but I aim to get one up once a month. I’m also in the early stages of starting a BookTok, so I’ll be sharing that when it finally happens. I’m doing plenty of writing, and even more reading. Which brings us to our first book review of the new year…

Every year, the Sunshine State Young Readers Award (SSYRA) Program in Florida names several lucky books Sunshine State books. These books have been voted on by schools across Florida as “the best” books for K-12 students. Alongside students’ and teachers’ votes, these books are “selected for their wide appeal, literary value, varied genres, curriculum connections, and/or multicultural representation.” As soon as the annual list gets released, your friendly Florida public librarians scramble to get them onto the shelves and into kids’ hands ASAP. The Sunshine State books make up the bulk of summer reading lists, and they fly off the shelves.  There have been many books that I would just love to read, but I hold off until winter or the next summer. The demand for these books is just too high, especially in the summer and fall, and I want to make sure that the kids who need them for school have them. 

But this year was different. A local school reached out to the public libraries and asked for help with their annual Battle of the Books. The librarians who signed up had to read two books from the Grade 6-8 list and write fifteen open-ended comprehension questions about them. A chance to read cool kids’ books on the clock? I jumped at the opportunity. 

The Lost Year by Katherine Marsh is the first of the two Sunshine State books I read. Here’s the SSRYA summary of the book: 

Thirteen-year-old Matthew is miserable. His journalist dad is stuck overseas indefinitely, and his mom has moved his one-hundred-year-old great-grandmother in with them to ride out the pandemic. Matthew is stuck at home during the early days of the pandemic, and he would rather play video games than hang out with his great-grandmother, GG. But Matthew’s mom has other plans. Forced to unpack GG’s storage boxes, Matthew finds a tattered blackand-white photo in his great-grandmother’s belongings that serves as a clue to a hidden chapter of her past, one that will lead to a life-shattering family secret. 

One of the reasons I wanted to read this book was because it took place, in part, during the COVID lockdown. It’s not a time that I look back on fondly, but I was one of the lucky few that was comfortable during that strange time. It was an unexpected break from a job I hated, my husband was still working, so we still had an income, and I was taking a young adult literature class in grad school. I spent most of my lockdown reading YA books, writing poetry, and playing Monster Prom. I wanted to see COVID from a kid’s perspective. I also wanted to see this modern historical event in fiction. It’s one thing to read about World War II in a novel, but another to read about an event you actually lived through. 

The other reason was that I wanted to know what the family secret was. I assumed that it was something World War II related. World War II is practically its own fiction genre at this point. I was wrong.

The novel is still centered around a major historic event in the 20th Century, but one I didn’t expect: the Holodomor. The Holodomor was a human-made famine in Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 which resulted in the deaths of millions of Ukrainians. I knew a little bit about the Holodomor, mostly because I’d read about Walter Duranty’s infamously inaccurate reporting of the famine. I’ve never seen it in a fiction book before. I’m sure that many young readers had never heard of the Holodomor before picking up The Lost Year either. While you should stick to non-fiction resources when you’re doing research, I think novels are a really good entry point for kids to learn more about history. Case in point: I wouldn’t be nearly as interested in Revolutionary War history as I am today if not for Felicity from the American Girl franchise. 

Despite what the summary led me to believe, most of the story is not about Matthew. It’s about three cousins leading very different lives in 1933, until they all brought together by the famine. Matthew’s chapters largely act as framing devices as he learns their stories from GG. He’s not as well developed as the cousins, but his character arc has a satisfying conclusion that works beautifully with the book’s theme. 

The cousins Matthew’s learns about are Helen, Mila, and Nadiya. Mila lives an easy life in Kyiv, the daughter of a high-ranking Soviet officer. Nadiya is from the Ukrainian countryside, and everything changes when she knocks on Mila’s door. Nadiya claims that she is Mila’s cousin, which Mila denies. To Mila, this girl is a kulak, an enemy of the State, and has to be lying about Mila’s father. When Mila discovers that Nadiya really is her cousin, and people are starving to death all around her, she has a choice to make. Can she protect Nadiya? Should she?

Helen lives with her family in New York City and strives to be a normal American girl, not the child of immigrants. When she reads Walter Duranty’s infamous “Russians Hungry, But Not Starving” article about the famine, she knows that it isn’t true. According to her parents, her family in Ukraine is struggling to survive. After some urging from a new friend, Helen sets out to collect the stories of friends and neighbors about the famine their relatives are experiencing. As she records history, she’s determined to help her relatives across the sea any way she can. 

My short review: The Lost Year is really good and you should read it. 

It isn’t always easy to read. It obviously deals with a heavy subject matter, and some readers may not be ready to revisit COVID. As I got to the end of the book, I  even put off reading it for a few days because I was so worried about one of the characters. Even so, it became one of my favorite books that I read in 2025. To me, it’s comparable with Out of the Dust or Number the Stars. All three books take place during a troubled time, and they don’t shy away from the dangers and tragedies of those time periods. 

There are those who think children need to be shielded from tragedy, and I understand that. I even agree, to a point. But I also believe that children are often more robust than we give them credit for. I also think that fiction is a safe way to introduce children to hard things. For example, one of the picture books I had growing up was called I Had a Friend Named Peter by Janice Cohn. In it, a young girl’s friend, Peter, dies. The book uses a narrative to teach children about death, and help facilitate conversations between children and their caregivers on the subject. In my opinion, the narrative makes it easier to engage with these topics. While I Had a Friend Named Peter is pretty didactic, I believe this is true of many books. There are so many great books that deal with tough subjects, whether they be historical events like the Holodomor, or things that are universally relevant to all of us: loss, love, friendship, jealousy, navigating relationships. 

I think this is true of books that are not strictly meant to teach as well. There are so many books that deal with tough subjects that are relevant to everyone’s life. Fiction can be a shield. It allows us to experience things through the eyes of characters. We can share their feelings, but also put the book away when we need to. When we encounter hard times, we have someone we can relate to, and even look to for comfort. 

There were a lot of things that I loved about the book. I’m very picky when it comes to historical fiction, but Soviet Union history is something that I have a lot of interest in. I also really like the small details of everyday life in historical settings when they’re interwoven in the text. I really hate a research dump in fiction, which was one of the problems I had with Magic Lessons. Here, those little details come naturally, like Mila’s favorite candy being Bumble Bears, or the characters playing the Russian card game Trust, Don’t Trust. 

Even the 2020 timeline has this. Maybe the COVID shutdown isn’t far enough back to be considered historical fiction, but someday it will be. Ten, fifteen, twenty years from now, those details of school over Zoom, only being able to see your friends if they walk by your house, and the anxiety and monotony of lockdown will be one way that kids will learn about what that strange time was really like.

I really liked the character arcs for Helen and Mila. Helen just wants to be a regular American girl. She doesn’t want to stick out, and wants to hide what makes her different from all the other kids she goes to school with. After she learns about the famine, and her family’s personal connection to it, she starts to change. Over the course of the novel, Helen learns how to find her voice and takes pride in her Ukrainian heritage. She takes an active role in preserving history, even if she doesn’t see it that way at the time. Her clever thinking helps save Nadiya’s life, and she pushes the adults in her life into action. 

The character who goes through the most change is Mila. She starts the novel as the spoiled daughter of a high-ranking Soviet officer and has an easy life full of luxuries the rest of the Soviet people do not have. Mila is ignorant of the things happening all around her, and sees the world in a black and white way. You are either a good Communist, protected by Papa Stalin, or you are a kulak, and deserve whatever happens to you. When Nadiya knocks on her door, Mila doesn’t believe that a kulak could be her cousin, or that the famine is even real. Instead of staying in her comfortable world of piano lessons and propaganda, she chooses to learn more and discover the truth for herself. 

The other thing I loved about the book was the overarching theme of storytelling. Storytelling plays a significant role for each of the three POV characters. In 2020, as GG tells Matthew her story, he discovers that there’s so much more to her than he ever knew. He also learns that her whole story has never been told, not even to her daughter or her cousin Helen. Matthew records GG’s stories, but ultimately gets her to share her story with the world, so that the truth of what happened to her won’t be forgotten. 

Mila’s father tells her stories every day. Instead of fairytales, though, he tells her stories of Soviet heroes and the greatness of the Soviet Union. Mila eagerly absorbs these stories and never thinks to question them. Those stories form the basis of her beliefs about the Soviet Union and her own life. When Nadiya forces her to confront the truth, Papa’s stories become just as fanciful as Baba Yaga. The book also shows how it’s hard to let go of the things you believe, even when it’s staring you in the face. 

Helen collects personal stories about the Holodomor at first to write to The New York Times with a rebuttal to Duranty’s reporting on the famine. These stories help her become engrained in her community and spur her into action. As we see in the epilogue, Helen’s dedication to sharing the truth about the Holodomor shapes her entire life. Her work helps preserve the true history of both her family and the famine, but it also guides her into the future. 

When we read about historical events, it can be easy to get lost in the numbers. Storytelling and oral history puts a face on the survivors. I can read facts about the Dust Bowl, but it won’t make me feel anything as much as my grandma’s stories about living through it did. Stories are entertaining, of course. But they can also be used to teach, to put a face on history, and to keep the memories of our loved ones alive. The Lost Year does all of these. 

If you’re interested in learning more about the Holodomor, you can visit the Holodomor Research and Education Consortium (HREC) website. The section Witness Accounts contains links to oral history collections and other primary resources. Author Katherine Marsh and her cousin, Andrea Zoltanetzky, share their family’s memories of the Holodomor and the Ukrainian immigrant experience in the book’s backmatter, and in this YouTube video: 

The discussion questions I wrote for the book: 

1.       What do you think The Lost Year refers to for Matthew? What does it refer to for Helen and Mila?

2.       Helen’s mother and Matthew’s mother warn them that they’re upsetting people by asking for their stories. Why did GG and the people Helen interviewed share their stories, even if they’re upsetting?

3.       What role does storytelling play in the story for Mila, Helen, and Matthew?

4.       Ruth says that Helen is a good leader. In what ways is she a leader?

5.       How does Mila deal with losing faith in her father, while at the same time loving him very much?

6.       How does meeting Nadiya change the way that Mila understands the world? 

7.       How is Mila’s friendship with Nadiya different from her friendship with Katya? How is it similar?

8.       Why did GG hide her true identity for so long?

9.       Why does Helen want to be seen as a normal American girl?

10.   The main characters’ parents all guide them in different ways through the novel. How does their parents’ guidance shape them at the start of the book? How does it shape them by the end of the book?

11.   What similarities does the book show between the COVID-19 pandemic and the Holodomor?

12.   How does Mila see Dasha at the beginning, middle, and end of the book? How does Dasha see Mila?

13.   Anna Mikhailovna says that Mila is either foolish or lucky. How is she foolish, lucky, or both?

14.   Why did Helen think that she couldn’t write to The New York Times?

15.   How did Mila’s and Nadiya’s roles reverse by the end of the novel?

by booksoverlookedblog

52 Books in 52 Weeks: Best Sellers & Diversity

This is the final post in my 52 Books project, and it covers an enormous topic: diversity in youth literature.

This is a hugely important topic to me. I didn’t grow up in an area with a lot of diversity of race, religion, or otherwise. Like many small town kids, my window to the wider world came from media: books, TV, and movies. Growing up, my impressions of people who were different from me came from what I saw and read.

But good representation is even more important if you’re part of a group that isn’t depicted frequently in media, or depicted stereotypically. This is especially true for children and teens. Think back to your childhood heroes for a minute. Who did you admire, and why? As I’ve mentioned before, one of my heroes was astronaut Eileen Collins, the first woman to command the Space Shuttle. I followed her career with great interest, dreaming of the day I would be the first person on Mars. While I’m not an astronaut, she inspired a lifelong interest in space, aviation, and most importantly to my current career, STEAM education.

All people, but kids especially, need to see themselves in the books they read or shows they watch. If you can’t see it, you can’t be it.

Things are changing in the publishing industry. Since 1985, the Cooperative Children’s Book Center has kept track of youth literature by and about Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. While we certainly have more BIPOC voices than before, publishing remains White and male dominated. It’s also important to see how many debut writers of color are published each year. Kwame Alexander and Jason Reynolds may top the charts (and with good reason), but one or two voices can’t speak for an entire group of people.

Another reason this is so important for me is because I’m a public librarian in Florida. Florida is one of the most diverse states in the U.S.A., and I live in one of the most diverse counties within that state. Florida is also banning books and removing them from schools left, right, and center. Legislation like the “Don’t Say Gay” law, bans on teaching critical race theory, and even blocking AP African American Studies in schools have forced teachers and school media specialists to go through their libraries and remove books, or risk losing their jobs. I won’t get into all of this right now – that’s another post entirely. But I will say that anti-LGBTQAI+ and removing discussions of race in the classroom is both infuriating, and a disservice to our kids. Kids have the right to information and books, and to learn about the wider world, and politicians are robbing them of that freedom in a reactionary attempt to appeal to their base.

None of these laws target public libraries yet. I feel that I have a responsibility to the kids and families that I work with to keep our collections diverse and inclusive, so every kid can see themselves as heroes and leaders.

While reading my 52 books, I took note of what racial diversity was present. There are a few ways that I could do this, but I decided to keep track of the main character(s) in each book. They’re who the reader will be spending the most time with, after all. It’s not perfect data, either, but I love a good pie chart. My stats also don’t go into how these characters are depicted. Some books are represented more than once, in the case of multiple lead characters. For example, Ground Zero stars Brandon, who is cued as Latinx, and Reshmina, who is Afghani. For that book, I marked it as both Latinx and Middle-Eastern. Other books that have ensemble casts are marked as “multiracial.” To clarify: I use the term “multiracial” as it refers to race, while “multiethnic” refers to cultural identity. I’ve also included the categories of “animal” and “objects,” since a few books star critters or machines (Dog Man is categorized as “Animal,” btw). Finally, when characters’ races aren’t mentioned, White is the assumed default. Wait, don’t click away! Let me explain:

This is an issue when it comes to reading and writing fiction: if a character’s skin color is not described, most readers picture that character as White. Cover art may support this as well. It’s also really unfair, so for you novelists out there: please describe ALL your characters’ skin tones, not just some of them! The Tumblr Blog Writing With Color is an awesome resource for writing all kinds of skin tones.

Now, let’s get to the data! And if you’re uncomfortable, good. I am too.

I am far from an expert on diversity, equity, and inclusion. I also need to acknowledge that being White, cishet, and middle class, I’m speaking from a point of privilege.

To that end, I’ve started talking to people who aren’t me and have different identities and experiences one simple and important question: “Why does representation in literature matter?” I have already received some very well-thought out and in-depth answers, and I’m looking forward to reading more and sharing responses in a later post.

Until then, there are a plethora of resources online that can help you find multicultural literature, and why #WeNeedDiverseBooks.

by booksoverlookedblog

52 Books in 52(ish) Weeks Part 3: Surprise and Unsurprise

Apologies for the delay in this post! I was celebrating my Irish pride over the weekend and simply forgot. This week, I’m continuing my journey of reading youth books off the New York Times best seller lists.

As I read through all these books, there were some things that surprised me, but probably shouldn’t have, if I had thought about them for more than a few minutes. Then there was some stuff that did surprise me. Thankfully, it was usually a pleasant surprise.

Things That Surprised Me (But Shouldn’t Have)

Picture books come in series, too.

When I think of book series, I usually think of YA books and early chapter books, not picture books. I don’t know why I was surprised when I saw more books starring Little Blue Truck, the Very Hungry Caterpillar, and Pete the cat. I had plenty of different picture books as a child featuring the same characters over and over again (Madeline and Corduroy were my favorites). It just makes sense: kids can get excited to see their favorites again and again, in different stories, and the creator typically has commercial success.

In picture books, the illustrations are not just decorations.

When I read picture books, my focus goes naturally towards the words. This is probably some awful side-effect of being an adult. In some picture books, like ones for older children, this is fine: the illustrations enhance the story, but the story can be understood without it. But in many others, illustrations are as much a part of the story as the text is. If you ignore the illustrations, or only give them a glancing look, you can miss a lot of the story, as well as some of the best jokes. There are also many wonderful wordless (or very nearly wordless) picture books out there that I love. My favorite picture books are the ones where you need text and illustrations to tell a complete story.

Books are cyclical.

This is another one I should have seen coming. It didn’t surprise me to see holiday books top the list when they were in season. But it did surprise me to see the same holiday books come up again in the following year’s list, continuing on until 2023. I found out recently that this is true for YA books, as well as picture books. In 2022, Long Live the Pumpkin Queen, by Shea Ernshaw, made it onto the Best Seller list just before Halloween. Are these new holiday classics? Time will tell.

Things that Surprised Me

Things don’t move around on the Best Seller List as much as you’d think.

With a year of reading books from the New York Time’s Best Seller List, I expected I’d read a lot of things I might never have tried otherwise, as well as well-known books. I did, but found that books didn’t move around on the list as much as I thought they would. Towards the end of my year of reading, I kept having to go further down the list to find a book or author I hadn’t read yet. This was especially true for middle grade fiction. Wimpy Kid and its offshoots and Wonder never seemed to move off the list, though they did move up and down it sometimes.

YA Inexplicably on the Middle-Grade List

When I started this project, I chose to read only from the lists for picture books, children’s middle grade books, and children’s series. I decided not to read anything of the YA Best Sellers list, just because I can’t whizz through a YA novel in a week, and I did want to get this done in a year. Even so, I ended up reading four books that were unquestionably YA (Shadow and Bone, Serpent and Dove, The Cruel Prince, and Part of Your World.) There were also several others that could be either middle-grade or YA. The four YA books were all on the “Children’s Series” list – which is just called “Series” now. So perhaps it’s not that weird, but it was to me at the time.

There’s a decent amount of non-fiction on Best Sellers lists for youth.

It wasn’t until the past ten years or so that I started to enjoy non-fiction, and it wasn’t until about two years ago that I started reading it regularly. As a kid, I always thought non-fiction was boring, just stuff you read for school. In a world where Harry Potter exists, there was no way I was ever choosing an informational text instead of a boy wizard’s adventures. Most of my peers were the same way. I was surprised to see so much non-fiction on the list. I might’ve predicted Becoming: Young Reader’s Edition, but not other books of biographies. Yet the Who Is/Was series is remarkably popular, and I’ve talked to kids at my library who have become interested in history and non-fiction. I don’t see as much demand as the What Is/What Was or the newer Where Is/Was series, but they still get a lot of check-outs. These books turn history into a narrative, and pack a lot of information in each one. As far as other types of non-fiction: I had no idea that I’d see cookbooks on the same Best Sellers list, alongside books with a narrative. I just assumed that cookbooks would be their own thing. But it is cool to see kids taking an interest in non-fiction. At least they won’t have to wait until they’re in their twenties to discover that non-fiction can be fun to read, too.

Empowerment, confidence, and topical issues.

Along with nonfiction, another theme I saw in the books I read was empowerment and confidence. Books like Ambitious Girl, Living the Confidence Code, and Change Sings all focus on building confidence, and encourage kids (often girls) to chase after their dreams. There were also books focusing on topical issues as well. Books like Stamped (For Kids) and We are Water Protectors are the most obvious. The novels also had a lot of topical messages and tackled current events, too. Ground Zero was about 9/11, then jumped ahead twenty years to the war in Afghanistan, and how it affected Afghanis. Ali Cross brought up the topics of policing and race (though not to a deep extent) as well as homelessness. I can’t think of a fictional book I read as a kid that dealt with current events in such a direct way. This may have just been my reading choices; most of my favorite middle-grade books were fantasy and sci-fi, sometimes with a conservation message. Of course, you’re also talking to the person who missed the Aslan-as-Jesus metaphor when I first read The Chronicles of Narnia.

There’s a lot of diversity!

I’ll expand on this in my next post on this project. Suffice it to say, in the past, books in the U.S. have overwhelmingly featured White characters over characters of color. While the majority of characters in these books were White, I was happy to see as much racial diversity in the books as I did. This is something I’ll get into more detail with later. Until then, if that’s something you’re interested in, the Cooperative Children’s Book Center from University of Wisconsin-Madison has a lot of interesting statistics and information about diversity in children’s books (CCBC Diversity Statistics).

by booksoverlookedblog

52 Children’s Books in 52 Weeks

52 Books in 52 Weeks: The Quest
Part 1: The Books
Part 2: The Authors

This isn’t a proper blog post, so much as an accountability booster for a reading project. I’ve never set goals for pleasure reading for myself before, this the only thing I had closely resembling a “goal” was “read all the books!”

I do have a career goal, though, which is to become a youth services librarian. One thing that’s important for me to do is to know what kids are currently into. The books I loved when I was 10 are not necessarily books kids today will love. To that end, my goal is to read 1 book from The New York Times best sellers for children each week.

There’s no one single list for children’s best sellers. Rather, NYT divides them into categories: picture book, children’s middle grade hardcover, children’s series, and young adult hardcover. For this, I’m just sticking to picture books, middle grade, and series.

Some ground rules for this project:

1. I will read from a different list each week. In order: picture book, middle grade hard cover, children’s series. Wash, rinse, repeat.
2. I will read the first* book on each list.
3. If I have already read the first book on the list, I will move to the second, and so forth.

Hopefully, I’ll be able to come back next year and report back with observations, and perhaps micro-reviews of each book.

*Except The Ickabog.