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.

Sit

Written by Deborah Ellis

Groundwood Books

978-1-77306-086-6

144 pp.

Ages 10-13

October 2017

The premise for Sit is simple.  There are eleven short stories based on chairs and other places upon which the young protagonists sit, rest, work, deliberate, speculate.  Each begins with a name, descriptor of the seat and usually the place.

Jafar was sitting on a work bench in the furniture factory. (pg. 11) 

Miyuki was sitting on a tatami in the evacuation centre. (pg. 72) 

Mike is sitting on his heels on the floor of his cell. (pg. 91)

Except for two scenarios to which the protagonists return in somewhat different settings, each story is unique.  Still all are touching and deeply personal and insightful about the human condition and humanity, all told based on where we sit and why.

The first story, The Singing Chair, is the story of Jafar, a young boy who works in a furniture factory in Jakarta in order to pay off his family's debt.  But his life is more than this because after work he attends a school for working children and he is learning to read and write.  Jafar returns in the final story called The Hope Chair which focuses on the school and the overwhelming hope it gives him to write himself a bigger and better story.

More stories of a contemporary setting but which transport young readers to global locations include an escape from Taliban rule in Afghanistan to an equally reprehensible "safety" (The Hiding Chair) and Miyuki's story of entering the danger zone after the earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster in order to rescue her mother's donkey (The Glowing Chair).  Still a little different is the story titled The Question Chair in which a Berliner named Gretchen is thrown into intense contemplation about the experiences of the Jewish people and the Germans during World War II after sitting on a toilet at a concentration camp museum outside of Krakow.

Some stories read as more local but of worlds perhaps unknown to many readers and sadly familiar to others. There is the Mennonite community in the aftermath of a horrible tragedy (The Plain Chair) and a prison in which a young man in solitary confinement finds hope from an anonymous source (The Freedom Chair).  Even The Day-off Chair has a little girl on a street bench trying to find calm in her angry world, one in which harm is expected. The Time-Out Chair, represented by the pink chair with dinosaur on the cover, is the chair to which seven-year-old Macie is relegated for her multitude of "sins" but where she finds solace in her imagining of a forest house. The only other stories in which the protagonists are revisited are The Knowing Chair and The War Chair which focus on children in a family in transition.  From a food court table and chairs to a swing outside the neutral location for the family custody switch, Barry and his little sister Sue are pulled along in their parents' conflict. Regrettably this story may be all too familiar to some children.

As very different as the stories are in situation, each is a story with a young person struggling either with others or with themselves in order to survive emotionally and/or physically the trials of their lives.  What they learn of others and themselves in the process of sitting is extraordinary.  For Deborah Ellis's young people, sitting is but a starting point for new life stories.  Given the choice of remaining seated, condemned to a suspended existence, or getting up and moving forward, Deborah Ellis's young people choose life in whatever form is available.

Maybe she would live.  Maybe she would ride a great train of suffering for a long, long time, but there might be one day when that train would stop, and she could have a belly full of food and a face full of sun. (pg. 117)