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 eleven-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.
Excited but a little apprehensive about her circumstances, Kirsten does what every young girl from suburban Canada does at camp----complains about the food, balks at using the toilets, and mocks her group's leaders behind their backs. But she also evades the Soviet Red Army in a foot race through and around Red Square, receives extended radiation treatments for a minor case of tonsillitis, and makes a gut-churning unauthorized parachute jump----without being totally certain whether her parachute will 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.
Kirsten Koza received her B.A. in theatre from Dalhousie University in Canada and did her post-graduate work in London, England at East 15. Her play "Second Night Syndrome" premiered at the Corbett Theatre in London in 1996. She has taught at the University of East London, in England, and was the artistic director of The Red Barn Theatre, Canada's oldest professional summer theatre. |
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