Deborah Ellis has never shied away from taking a stand, as her award-winning fiction and non-fiction about AIDS and war attests. She’s firmly on the side of those marginalized by poverty, gender, race, and age. On all those scores, Jakeman’s main characters, the children of women in prison, are an especially vulnerable group.

The bus that takes 11-year-old Jake and his 16-year-old sister Shoshana to the upstate women’s prison leaves at midnight, and it’s going to be a rocky ride. The driver hates kids and makes everyone line up in the rain, but at least at the journey’s end all the kids will see their moms. Jake has been writing to the governor asking for a pardon for his mother, but so far the governor hasn’t replied.

The prison guards taunt the children, and the warden prides herself on the grimness of the visiting room as a deterrent to future crime. On the return trip, half of the bus passengers come down with food poisoning, and the driver is drunk. With the adults who are supposedly in charge sick in the hospital, Shoshana takes the wheel. The bus lurches across the state on a terrifying – but hilarious – trajectory that leads against all odds straight to the governor.

It would make a terrific movie, but perhaps because of its didacticism, it’s not entirely a satisfying book. Like the title, Jakeman is slightly cartoony. Most characters in positions of power abuse it: they’re mean, self-serving, or weak. Ellis portrays the (American) social justice system as perpetuating a cycle of oppression. Unfortunately, Jakeman is lacking in balance, even though many of the cruel and insensitive acts she describes doubtless happen every day.