“The Girl Who Owned A City” Review

  See That? That’s my old, battered copy of “The Girl Who Owned A City” that I dug out of the giveaway pile found during my period of Library Service senior year of high school.  I found it while enduring the sobering reading  “Lord of The Flies” for my AP English class. Like Lord of the Flies, this story is a tale that features children living without adults and the hard lessons that they learn with living without them. The back story here is that a little more than a year ago some unexplained virus—a plague hit the world’s population and killing off all the adults. Actually, the plague took anyone over the cusp of puberty: so the only inhabitants are children no older than twelve.   Enter Lisa, a ten year old girl who is smart as a whip and super resourceful to boot. Once a time ago all she worried about was school, her parents’ affections and being the older sister to an impossibly bratty younger brother named Todd. She’s been forced to grow up quickly in this new world so now she’s going on scavenger runs to score food and being the only person her kid brother Todd can depend on for his survival. Sitting through lectures of my English teacher drone on about the book I had half read and had little interest in, I would daydream. My mind would wonder to Lisa, Todd, Jill, Craig and all the other children and the world that had been left in their hands.   A world without adults. A world left in the hands of children. A world without rules.   A world…