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Outside In

by Sarah Ellis

Sarah Ellis’s latest middle-grade novel tackles issues of waste, consumerism, and family in a Borrowers-style tale about close encounters between those who live in conventional society and those who exist outside of it.

When she’s not posting feel-good affirmations in random places around the house, 13-year-old Lynn’s self-help obsessed mother Shakti has, ironically, been busy ruining her daughter’s life. Her failure to send off Lynn’s passport application means Lynn can’t go on a school trip to the U.S., and an affair with a colleague’s drop-crotch-pants-wearing husband has led Shakti’s boyfriend to storm out and end the most stable five years of Lynn’s life.

In the midst of this crisis Lynn has her first encounter with the Underlanders, an unorthodox, cobbled-together family led by Fossick, an ex-physics professor with a propensity for quoting Shakespeare. The Underlanders (who refer to their on-the-grid counterparts as “Citizens”) live clandestinely in “the cottage,” a bunker under the city’s reservoir, and survive entirely by bartering, recycling, and scavenging.

Their isolation means that, despite their resourcefulness, the Underlanders lack social skills, and Lynn is perplexed but charmed when Blossom, a girl about her age who was rescued from a dumpster when she was a baby, openly practises the friend-making techniques she learned from a teen magazine. Lynn also gives Blossom insights into the behaviour of Blossom’s older brother Tron, currently in the throes of teenage rebellion.

At the cottage, Lynn meets Blossom’s autistic brother Larch, who makes beautiful miniatures inside toilet paper tubes that the family sells for food. The girls’ developing friendship and the Underlanders’ livelihood is threatened, however, when Shakti inadvertently blows their cover.

While some readers will find the alien-meets-earthling disconnect between Underlanders and Citizens a bit on the extreme side, Ellis mitigates encroaching disbelief with lots of easy humour (when Lynn first meets Blossom, her biggest fear is that the other girl is living proof that the worlds portrayed in her mother’s flaky fantasy books are real). The novel’s environmental message is admirable, but Ellis’s wonderfully imaginative descriptions of the Underlanders’ unorthodox existence are what readers will find most entrancing.

 

Reviewer: Emily Donaldson

Publisher: Groundwood Books

DETAILS

Price: $16.95

Page Count: 208 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 978-1-55498- 367-4

Released: May

Issue Date: June 2014

Categories: Children and YA Fiction, Kids’ Books

Age Range: 10-13