Step

Written by Deborah Ellis

Groundwood Books

978-1-77306-815-2

150 pp.

Ages 8-12

March 2022

For many of us, our days are spent stepping out and stepping in and stepping around. These are our everyday lives of going to school or work, dealing with peers and family, and returning home. But there are milestone days. For many children, those days include their birthdays. And, for the children of Deborah Ellis's ten stories in Step, the milestone day of an 11th birthday brings with it a new opportunity to step. 

 

Each of the ten stories within Step is titled with a single and powerful word.  They are Smash, Alone, Rock, Rubber, Shoes, Ride, Laundry, Free, Nails, and Supper. Some take place in familiar North American settings, like Smash in which Connor takes his sister's rejected and fearful dog for a walk and both see and become something different. Or Ride, in which Aislyn is taken to the county fair by her older sister and deserted to spend time with her boyfriend. But there are other stories that take us to the unfamiliar. In Rubber, Oma and her family are escaping on a rubber raft for Europe, and in Free, a child and her mother and sister leave the gangs and deaths of their homeland to walk days into the land of the free. Perhaps the most disparate in setting is Laundry in which Masud shares a cell with twenty-one men at a prison-like Libyan detention facility. Their cell is a community of unrelated persons who have come together to work as family for everyone. Most unusual is the story of Rock. While its setting will be familiar to young readers, Rock is wholly different in that it includes a supernatural element that links our world with another to highlight a social injustice halfway around the world.

 

From the pen of Deborah Ellis always comes brilliant writing but also profound attention to social justice and the courage of children to step up. This is the same in Step. From neo-Nazis, an inhumane detention center, gang violence, poverty, bullying and those seeking refuge, Deborah Ellis lets young readers see from the perspective of eleven-year-olds who are leaving their childhoods behind and looking at people and places with fresh eyes. For many, that one day of transition from 10 to 11 has given them clarity for flawed family members, for right and wrong, and for their own place.

I love that there has been a resurgence of short story collections, especially themed ones such as Deborah Ellis's latest collection, a companion book to her earlier Sit (2017). In Step, eleven-year-olds are stepping into, stepping up and stepping away. And sometimes doing what is actually another, like Lazlo in Shoes who by stepping away is actually stepping up. These children from around the world are dealing with big issues in their own homes, in their communities and in foreign lands. They must deal with their families, with their peers, with strangers, and with authorities. And each time they must decide what they will do in their steps. They could step back or around. They could do what they might have done at age ten and taken the familiar course. Ah, but they have all just turned eleven. That milestone moves them forward to step differently. These children have come of age, some in common circumstances and some in horrific struggles. Each has stepped into their new maturity in their own way, thinking beyond themselves and instead of others and the greater good. They have attained the wisdom that many of their elders have not.