Children’s literature is lousy with dead parents. Also nefarious and neglectful ones. Adulticide is often crucial if a story’s wee fictional humans are going to have adventures worth reading about. The allure of “The Boxcar Children,” for instance, about four orphans living in an abandoned train car, diminishes if the kids are playing orphan in a refrigerator crate.
Razzi, the 12-year-old narrator of Jennifer L. Holm’s excellent new novel, OUTSIDE (Scholastic, 240 pp., $17.99, ages 9 to 12), feels an affinity with the boxcar children. But unlike those kids, who “got to wander all over the place and have adventures,” Razzi, her little brother and four other children are “stuck in the boxcar,” as she puts it, watched by their parents in a fortified estate called the Refuge. They are survivors of the Great Poisoning more than a decade earlier, when “some stupid country … used a space weapon that showered poison down from the sky.”
Razzi accepts her circumstances — they’re all she’s known. She witnessed the dangers of Outside firsthand when she saw Ollie, another child in the Refuge, itching to explore, fall off the roof. “He’d wanted so badly to experience the Outside that he had died trying,” Razzi mourns.
After a medical examination reveals that Razzi needs a new heart, she receives a transplant from a greyhound named Wind. That may sound bonkers, but it’s not, at least not in the capable hands of Holm (the award-winning author of “Turtle in Paradise,” the Babymouse series and the Sunny series), who makes Razzi’s world utterly believable to both Razzi and, at least initially, the reader.
With Wind’s heart come changes: an allergy to chocolate, visions of the dog’s previous life and an urge to go to the one place Razzi has been taught to fear. “Was this the Wind part of me? Or was it just me? I was Outside, and I knew I had to run.”
Run she does. Adventures ensue, but so do many questions about what makes a dystopia. The result is a book that’s thinky and deep and also a hell of a ride. Kids will devour it. Adults, on the other hand, may feel unsettled by this uncomfortable trope: the well-meaning grown-ups who do everything to protect their children — and fail.
In Rebecca Stead’s marvelous THE EXPERIMENT (Feiwel & Friends, 288 pp., $17.99, ages 8 to 12), Nathan has the ultimate helicopter mom. She weighs every morsel of food he eats, tracks his step count and sleep patterns, and requires photographic proof that he’s brushing his teeth the obligatory five times a day with the pink toothpaste.
This isn’t just a matter of hygiene. Nathan and his family are space aliens known as the Kast. When Nathan’s parents were children, they traveled to Earth in the Wagon, a windowless spaceship.
Now they are disguising themselves and Nathan as human, via the pink toothpaste and soap and various blood regulation techniques. Though Nathan dreams of a life like his best friend Victor’s (“normal, messy and perfect”), he understands that he, along with a handful of children from other states, is an experiment.
When Nathan begins to grow a tail, it seems as if the experiment has failed. He’s summoned by the Kast boss, Hester, back to the Wagon, which is hidden in a storage unit in Altoona, Pa. There, with the help of his tail, which he christens Tuck, he finds the Kast children who have dropped out of the virtual meet-ups that were once part of the experiment and who now toil like extraterrestrial Cinderellas, cleaning green moss off the spaceship.
One of them, spitfire Izzy from Illinois (who was briefly Nathan from New York’s girlfriend but now has a thing with Leo from Louisiana), has begun to question the whole setup. “What if the Kast are the bad guys?” she asks Nathan.
Stead, the Newbery Medal-winning author of the modern classic “When You Reach Me,” deftly plays with larger themes of mind control and manipulation, othering and emotional growth, while never losing sight of the children at the heart of the narrative. The result is a rollicking and thought-provoking story about a group of kids coming together to learn some adult truths about the adults in their lives. As Hester says, “Your parents needed to believe, Nathan. They needed to believe deeply.”
And believe they did — as Razzi’s parents did, as so many parents today do — struggling to make good decisions for their kids with information that can be questionable at best, malicious at worst. Maybe that’s why a vein of sorrow runs through both books. Plucky kids leading adults to truth is a fine trope for literature, but in real life it’s like having dead parents: not so great.
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