The Door by the Staircase

The Kids Who Knew Too Little

Promise Boys

Pieces and Players

Call Me Floy

Into the Glades

In Plain Sight

Lock and Key: The Initiation

A middle-grade survival story that traces a family secret back to the Holodomor, a terrible famine that devastated Soviet Ukraine in the 1930s.

Thirteen-year-old Matthew is miserable. His journalist dad is stuck overseas indefinitely, and his mom has moved in his one-hundred-year-old great-grandmother to ride out the pandemic, adding to his stress and isolation.

But when Matthew finds a tattered black-and-white photo in his great-grandmother’s belongings, he discovers a clue to a hidden chapter of her past, one that will lead to a life-shattering family secret. Set in alternating timelines that connect the present-day to the 1930s and the US to the USSR, Katherine Marsh’s latest novel sheds fresh light on the Holodomor – the horrific famine that killed millions of Ukrainians, and which the Soviet government covered up for decades.

Inspired by Marsh’s own family history.

Discover Your Child's Next Read

The Door by the Staircase

Katherine Marsh, Kelly Murphy, 2016

The Kids Who Knew Too Little

Gitty Daneshvari, 2017

Promise Boys

Nick Brooks, 2023

Pieces and Players

Blue Balliett, 2015

Call Me Floy

Joanna Cooke, 2020

Into the Glades

Laura Sebastian, 2022

In Plain Sight

Richard Jackson, Jerry Pinkney, 2016

Lock and Key: The Initiation

Nicola Barber, Ridley Pearson, 2016