November 12, 2002
The Girl Who Owned a City, by O. T. Nelson
I rarely recommend children's books: I have no children. I am, however, an Uncle at Large for my friends with children, and as such can freely engage in the joyful intellectual corruption that such a role entails.
A few months ago, I read O. T. Nelson's The Girl Who Owned a City, and was impressed sufficiently to have given a birthday copy to a friend's pre-teen daughter of roughly the same age as the protagonist Lisa. The real-life girl is unfortunately in a joint-custody situation, and is under the influence most of the time of the erstwhile husband, a wimpy liberal. The mother, a good friend of mine, is a strong believer in the virtues of personal responsibility and leadership, but is unfortunately unable due to her custody arrangement to exercise as much parental guidance as she'd like.
So, I hope this book helps. It's the story of a girl, the oldest of the children in her family, who finds - along with all the other children in her city and, for all they know, in every city - that all the adults and pubescent teens have died of an unexplained plague. As an adult, I had to remind myself not to consider this necessary plot device as entirely contrived, and remember the audience. Having done that, I immersed myself in the storyline set up by the disappearance of the adults.
Left to fend for themselves, the great majority of the children of the story, without the parental guidance that so many "liberal" parents consider overbearing, revert to lower primate behaviors (no offense intended to our cousins the chimps and bonobos): they form marauding gangs, taking what they want and destroying what they don't understand.
This is a dark novel. The children face starvation, ignorance, vast uncertainty, politics and other human brutality, and violent death. However, protagonist Lisa finds something deep within herself to deal with all this, though not without personal cost, and leads a group of children to start rebuilding their lives and working themselves out of the new Dark Ages into which they'd reverted. A major theme of the work is reliance on reason over brute force, and is conveyed well to its target audience.
Posted by Russell Whitaker at November 12, 2002 11:14 AM | TrackBack