The Stolen Year: How COVID Changed Children’s Lives, and Where We Go Now is written by an education reporter, so I expected a book on the effects of COVID on education, and it is that, but so much more ... Anya Kamenetz chronicles the effects of the pandemic on the children of our country, providing a vivid picture of how we have failed our kids, especially those most vulnerable. In clear, concise, well-researched prose, she touches on centuries of U.S. history and the ways we have so often chosen to not support families, interspersed with examples of people taking matters into their own hands to create solutions at home and in their communities. I know I’m not alone in having trouble remembering these past two years. This book brought my own experiences as a teacher, parent and human being rushing back, affirming my struggle and that of those closest to me, while the wide range of voices from across the country broadened my perspective ... There is a lot of wisdom in these pages and inspiring examples of individuals ... not the manual of answers I had unrealistically hoped for when I picked it up, but the better we understand our failures and successes of these past two years — as individuals, as members of our local communities and as a wider society — the more likely we will be to take effective action in the next crisis. Maybe, as a place to start, this book should be required reading for us all.
... a relentless account of ruptures in so many Americans’ lives, from mental health crises to hunger to academic failures and accidents ... Kamenetz’s reach and aim as a reporter are admirable ... She elegantly incorporates studies and data. Her prose is tight, smooth and swift. The Stolen Year, however, reads more like a catalog of events than a probing, multidimensional narrative ... This stems from the way the book is structured: as a series of sections no more than a few pages long, and many much shorter, grouped loosely by subject. Many of these sections slightly conflict with one another and gesture toward different conclusions and arguments ... The effect on the reader of these discrete fragmentary bursts is of staring down at a plot of scattered fossils, trying to figure out what beast they represent ... In order for complications and contradictions to deepen a narrative rather than splinter it, they need to be woven together with incisive, sustained analysis. The Stolen Year, however, never burrows too deeply into any of the questions it poses ... Part of the reason these questions go unanswered lies in the book’s adherence to accepted and comfortable narratives ... a 339-page book about the devastating impacts of the pandemic on children — mental illness, academic setbacks, fractured family relationships — that does not engage deeply with the causes of school closure can start to seem like an act of magical thinking ... Kamenetz often relies on verbal contortions that obscure any clear actors ... gives us all the known characters playing all the same parts...My criticism is not that these characterizations don’t ring true to me, but that they are givens enacted with such fidelity that they render the world static ... While reported and written with empathy, care and skill, The Stolen Year ultimately did not reveal to me any new dimension of what I’d lived. What I found most interesting were the snippets of Kamenetz’s work that suggested more provocative and untold narratives.
... thoroughly researched, unsparing and intimately detailed ... As kids head back to school in this third year of the pandemic, Kamenetz has given us an essential read for anyone who wants to understand how American schools and schoolchildren fared in the early days. The book also investigates the historical factors, blatant inattention, and racist and sexist world that had shaped America’s public school and child-care systems into what they were by the time the virus began closing schools across the country in March 2020 ... She also offers thought-provoking, clear-eyed insights into the way systems and people functioned, and did not function, during the pandemic ... To her credit, Kamenetz has no desire to play the blame game. Rather than deploy a favorite argument of the right — that left-leaning parents, school officials and teachers’ unions were responsible for school closures — or entertain progressives’ assertions that virus-denying, Trump-supporting proponents of school reopening did not care much whether teachers lived or died, Kamenetz takes a more balanced view ... Still, the book is at times confusing, leaping backward and forward in time despite its ostensible division into sections labeled “Spring 2020,” “Summer 2020” and so on. The plethora of expert, parent and student voices from across the country can be overwhelming — and sometimes I wished for more direct quotes and thoughts from the children she interviewed, rather than summaries of their parents’ perspectives ... The book is at its best when Kamenetz’s human reporting is allowed to dominate the page.
