When most parents consider sending their child to summer camp, they imagine a sunny lake a few hours out of the city. In 1977, the parents of 11-year-old Kirsten Koza sent their pigtailed, sass-talking offspring on a summer trip to the Soviet Union—with only fifty dollars in her pocket. Lost in Moscow tells the story of Kirsten’s summer camp hijinks: evading the Soviet Red Army in a foot race through and around Red Square, receiving extended radiation treatments for a minor case of tonsillitis, and making a gut-churning, unauthorized parachute jump—without being totally certain whether her parachute would open or even stay on.
Told from the point of view and in the voice of the young Kirsten, Lost in Moscow is sex, politics, religion, fashion, and finance through the eyes of an eleven-year-old. Hilarious and at times hair-raising, this is a highly unusual travel memoir—a story about children, but definitely not for children.
