The Book Pirate

Hi. The Book Parrot here with my second review.

I recently re-read this and I’m not gonna lie. The Girl Who Owned a City is one of my favorite books of all time. I love young adult literature and I especially love stories about carving society down to just a select group of people and seeing what happens. It’s what makes Lord of the Flies one of the books I used to read every year.

And The Girl Who Owned a City has been described as Lord of the Flies for girls, but it’s so much more than that. And not just for girls either.

The basic plot: A deadly virus has swept the world, killing everyone over the age of 12. -Hey, it was written in the seventies. That was so in.- The only person who really seems to have it together is Lisa, a twelve year old girl who is surviving by using her brain. She can’t afford not to considering she has a younger brother, Todd to look out for. She begins to do things that twelve year olds either don’t do today, or used to know how to do a long time ago.

With no electricity, she learns how to grill, and make a fire. She goes out to a farm and finds a surviving chicken, learns to care for it and harvests the eggs. She begins searching for where grocery stores get their food and teaches herself how to drive.

All of this would be fine if it weren’t for street gangs of kids who have gathered together to steal food and beat other kids up. When Todd, Lisa’s little brother gets beaten for the food that they have found, Lisa takes matters into her own hands. She decides to rally the kids together on her street, Grand Avenue and convinces them that they need to band together to protect themselves. What follows is a master plan of training attack dogs, learning to fire guns, and creating booby traps for trespassers.

The Chidester gang isn’t having any of it though, and through a series of events force the citizens of Grand to leave their homes. I won’t ruin that plot piece for you. It’s good. But this forces Lisa to come up with an even better plan, a plan to create a fortress city, one that would be nearly impenetrable and one that she and the other citizens would defend with their lives.

There are so many memorable characters in this book. Craig, a young boy who becomes interested in farming and gardening as a way to live. Lisa may or may not have a crush on him. Jill Jansen is another memorable little girl, one who is taking stray kids into her home as a sort of foster mother.

The events that occur in the book are well paced and really make you consider what part you would have played had you been a child forced into this world. Any good story where civilization is dwindling does that in my opinion.

What’s more interesting to me about the book is the way the author makes you consider that most of society’s rules have been thrown out. What does it matter that Lisa is a girl? She can do anything anyone else can, in fact she is the leader of this new world and as the title tells us, the owner of a new city.

Upon google mapping the area the children lived in, it was drawn to my attention that the gang that fights them only lived one street over. This added so much to the story for me, realizing that it was basically the tale of this little section of this little suburb. Towards the end of the book there is mention of a king from a nearby city which made me wish desperately for a sequel. It just goes to show the audience the scope that is possible in the world created by O.T. Nelson.

The Girl Who Owned a City by O.T. Nelson

I post that cover because it is the cover of the copy that I own. Also, it inspired me so much that I did a painting of the main character.