Read-aloud Recommendation: Forbidden Child
A young girl named Piper lives on a cruise ship, floating across a flooded earth under the tender mercies of an all-powerful Godmother. Complete obedience is required, along with the ratting out of any neighbor you think is guilty of an infraction. Food is bland and tightly controlled. Most reading is outlawed. Punishment is swift and arbitrary.
And no babies are allowed. No unauthorized families or marriages. When Piper finds an illegal baby, the choice seems obvious. Turn the child in and condemn it to death while protecting herself. But for some reason, she doesn’t. Now, she must hide a hungry baby while trying to escape the ship, even though there is nothing but the ocean surrounding her.
This book is like 1984 for kids. But also for adults who want a dash of hope at the end of your dystopian novel instead of an ending that makes you want to eat your own hair. The world can be a hard place. Evil people reign and dominate. Winter oppresses with cold and threats of starvation.
But Christmas is always around the corner. The sun always rises again.
Forbidden Child is a hopeful dystopian novel. It threatens to crush the spirit of every character in the story, along with the reader, but it always pulls back at the right moment.
The author has done her research on totalitarian societies, including North Korea, and that authenticity bristles on the page. While fiction, the book is true to life. The Godmother is a vindictive, petty ruler, enslaved by her own paranoia, trapped in the system she helped create, blind to realities she must ignore in order to maintain power.
The book is a little too long and takes a while to get going, but based on the setup it has to do to establish its dreary world, I can forgive that. Eventually, it reaches out, locks your eyeballs to the page, and refuses to let go. The last half flies. It’s also full of delightful character descriptions that had us all chuckling.
Learning and Discussion Topics:
Communism and tyranny
Obedience to authority
Fear as a motivator
Sacrificial love
The value of life
The nature of power
Cult loyalty
Nautical terms and life at sea
Disclaimer: When I post discussion topics and vocabulary, it is not an attempt to redeem your reading time. Spending time reading to your kids is never a waste of time, even if you all just sit back and enjoy the story.
But if you want to get more mileage out of the book, or you are looking for a book to touch on some of these topics in an engaging way, these can be helpful.