Kristina Masone &
Gutter Child by Jael Richardson

Solid 3.75. Capitalism stinks!

GUTTER CHILD presents a dystopia insomuch as it is an unreal fictional space where the injustice, racism and classism seem unreal, and yet?? It is an apartheid; it is colonialism with all the segregation, slavery, stolen children and missing women you’d expect. It is a world where human beings are separated from families and set up in a society with rules that bind them by an indenture for most of their lives. Dystopia? This book is certainly an allegory of our time, but it is also an escape into a world where we witness strong, beautiful, intelligent teenagers challenge (or succumb to) the authoritarian Mainland, in an attempt to find a way forward. I don’t normally compare books, but when I handed it over to kid last night, I said, “you loved The Long Walk by Stephen King and you loved Hunger Games. You’re going to love this book.” I gave him a brief biography of Elimina and because he’s a huge fan of strong female protagonists, he’s added GUTTER CHILD to his #tbr shelf.

3.5/5

(4)

** spoiler alert ** This book was excellent, but it was hard. It was really hard to confront the topics Richardson talked about in this novel. I would call this a work of dystopian speculative fiction, though I’m not an expert and not sure if that would technically be correct. In this novel you follow Elimina, who was taken from her Gutter mother as a baby to be raised by a Mainlander. When her mother dies at the beginning of the story, leaving her without another soul who loves her, Elimina is sent to Livingstone Academy. At this academy, she meets, for the first time, other people “like her,” people she would come to learn are Sossi, the proper name for the people the Mainlanders dubbed “Gutter people.” It is through her exposure to her peers that we begin to see that while Elimina’s mother loved her, and Elimina loved her mother, the relationship was complicated. Elimina as a child could not understand why every other Mainlander hated her. Why they wouldn’t offer her and her mother services offered to other Mainlanders. We learn that Elimina has been bald her entire life because her (white) mother did not know how to care for her adoptive daughters (Black) hair. There is a deeply moving scene when Elimina first arrived at the academy and has her hair done my a Black woman for the first time, and isn’t forced to just shave her head. After some time spent at the Academy, Elimina attends the Hiring Fair as the headmasters assistant. It is hard to read this scene without likening it to chattel slavery. Gutter youths are hired off to wealthy Mainlanders to work off the “debt” they owe them. (This debt is bogus but something all Sossi must endure). The debt is something most Sossi never get free of, and most of the money they make goes to anyone but themselves, including debt managers and the headmasters of the academies they were raised at. It is important here to note that far as I can tell, these academies are used only for free labour and to train Gutter children to enter the workforce. There is even a point where Elimina’s good friend goes to auction, sold to the highest bidder. When Elimina learns she’s pregnant, she is sent to a home for “troubled” girls. At this home, the Academy aged girls carry their babies, only to have the “property” reclaimed by the Mainland government whether these girls want the baby or not. The infant will be sent to a junior academy, where they will grow up without parents, or any connection to their people. There is one particularly brutal scene where Elimina’s friend tries to keep her own baby, only to have the baby stolen from her arms and to be arrested. The injustice continues when Elimina enters the Gutter. This is where the majority of Sossi live, and those who never leave the Gutter for an Academy and the workforce have very little hope of paying off their debt and earning their freedom. The Gutter is kept separate from Mainland society, behind a wall, and all the wealth is basically channeled out. The Sossi people do not have doctors. They do not have good schools. They do not have good jobs. We see that many Sossi elect to get subsidy cheques rather than work as they have at least then guaranteed income and can house and feed their families, even if each cheque adds to their debt so greatly that even their grandchildren have no hope of paying off their debt. At the end of the novel, a small altercation between two Sossi friends turned into a police shooting that killed four. The media on the mainland showed it as a riot that the police were finally able to quell, however four individuals were unfortunately wounded and later succumbed to their injuries. The reality was that the Mainland Guard opened fire on a crowd of Sossi who were having a community meeting, and those four people were gunned down in the street. The struggles faced by Elimina and the Sossi people in this book are struggles that BIPOC people face every day, especially in North America. The Mainlanders came from another part of the world, colonizing traditional Sossi land and pushing them out of space they had always lived, and eventually into a very small amount of their original land where they had inadequate healthcare, education and job availability. The Mainlanders actions caused huge inequity between Sossi and Mainlanders and created a system where it was virtually impossible to advance from their indebted status. These are experiences that specifically Black and Indigenous people in Canada and the USA speak about and are often ignored or silenced. While it was incredibly emotional to confront the injustice happening in this book, Richardson tied it with the real world, lived experience of BIPOC people in a deeply accessible and moving way. This book is important, and I can definitely see it being one taught in classrooms for years to come.

I couldn't put this down, pretty much read it in one sitting!

This sci-fi dystopian novel reminds me of both The Handmaid's Tale and Internment (the latter written by Samira Ahmed), while still being utterly unique. It explores race, justice, and (in)equality. This is a powerful work, and it will definitely leave you feeling unsettled. Because yes, even if this is a fictional world, it is all too familiar. Some reviews say that this is a reflection of what the world could become if we are not careful. But we're already there, and society chooses to turn a blind eye.