Outside In – Booktalking #kidlit

Outside In
by Sarah Ellis (Author)

Booktalk: Lynn’s life is full — choir practice, school, shopping for the perfect jeans, and dealing with her free-spirited mother. Then one day her life is saved by a mysterious girl named Blossom, who introduces Lynn to her own world and family — both more bizarre, yet somehow more sane, than Lynn’s own. Blossom’s family is a small band of outcasts and eccentrics who live secretly in an ingenious bunker beneath a city reservoir. The Underlanders forage and trade for the things they need (“Is it useful or lovely?”), living off the things “Citizens” throw away. Lynn is enchanted and amazed. But when she inadvertently reveals their secret, she is forced to take measure of her own motives and lifestyle, as she figures out what it really means to be a family and a friend.

Snippet: “Where are we? What is this place? I mean, what was it before it was your house?”

“It’s one of the forgotten places. Fossick says it was some kind of construction storage area when they were building the reservoir. It got walled off.”

“How did you guys find it?”

“Fossick discovered it, before I was born. He likes to look around behind things. He says that even in a city there are many places unaccounted for. I’ve lived here my whole life.”