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.