Life hasn’t been easy for 14 year-old Harold Kline. He’s spent his childhood being victimized by schoolyard toughs because he’s an albino with plaster-white skin, snowy white hair, and thick glasses with black lenses to protect his eyes from the sun. It’s 1947 and Harold is still reeling from the wartime deaths of his father and older brother and his mother’s remarriage to a weedy small-town banker he can’t stand. When the travelling circus stops in Liberty and Harold meets tiny Princess Minikin and Samuel the Living Fossil, he decides to run away and join the circus. But despite developing close friendships with the performers as well as coming up with a sensational new act for the circus elephants, Harold feels he still doesn’t quite fit in.

Ghost Boy is a dramatic departure in both theme and setting from Lawrence’s first two rollicking high-seas adventure novels for young readers, the 1999 Geoffrey Bilson Award-winning The Wreckers and its sequel, The Smugglers. And perhaps that very difference is what makes Ghost Boy such a startling and rewarding novel. This is an extremely accomplished and thoughtful exploration of what it means to be different. Lawrence makes readers truly feel the scope of Harold’s dilemma as an outsider, which is what ultimately makes this novel so powerful.

Ghost Boy is set in the past but it deals with contemporary issues through the stories of other outsiders like Gypsy Magda, victim of the Nazi extermination of the Roma, and Thunder Wakes Him’s tales of the decimation of the First Nations by the U.S. army. While these serious themes are at the heart of the novel, Ghost Boy is also full of great humour, especially in depicting Harold’s trials in teaching his pachyderm pals to play baseball. Like Monica Hughes’s The Keeper of the Isis Light and Marthe Jocelyn’s Earthly Astonishments, Ghost Boy is a great read that’s profoundly affecting.