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The Outsmarters

By (author) Deborah Ellis
Categories: Children’s / Teenage fiction: General fiction, Children’s / Teenage fiction and true stories, Children’s, Teenage and Educational, Children’s / Teenage personal and social topics: Self-awareness and self-esteem, Children’s / Teenage: Personal and social topics, Children’s / Teenage personal and social topics: Drugs and addiction
Publisher: Groundwood Books
Hardcover : 9781773068572, 248 pages, August 2024
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Excerpt

I fetch an old shoebox from the back of the crawl space and climb up on my bed.

I open the box.

Inside: A collection of pictures of fancy bedrooms clipped from magazines and held together with a paperclip. An incomplete math test with a big red F at the top and big red curse words where there should have been a Venn diagram. One long pink and orange sock and one hair elastic with dark blue bobbles on it.

These were my mother’s things …

Also in the box — three small wooden puzzles, the kind with the small pieces that fit together only one way to make a cube or an egg. These are the puzzles I had in my pockets when Mom dumped me here. She was always getting them for me because they were easy to steal …

I put the six dollars in the shoebox … put the box under my bed and then sit by my window and look at my philosophy booth.

When Mom comes back for me — and she will — I’ll have a ton of money saved.

Then she can dump whatever jackass boyfriend is with her and just be with me.

Description

What can you do when the adult world lets you down?

Suspended from school and prone to rages, twelve-year-old Kate finds her own way to get on with her life, despite the messed-up adults around her. Her gran, for one, is stubborn and aloof — not unlike Kate herself, who has no friends, and who’s been expelled for “behavioral issues,” like the meltdowns she has had ever since her mom dumped her with her grandmother three years ago. Kate dreams that one day her mother will return for her. When that happens, they’ll need money, so Kate sets out to make some.

Gran nixes her idea to sell psychiatric advice like Lucy in Peanuts (“You’re not a psychiatrist. You’ll get sued.”), so Kate decides to open a philosophy booth to provide answers to life’s big and small questions. She soon learns that adults have plenty of problems and secrets of their own, including Gran. When she finds that her grandmother has been lying to her about her mother, the two have a huge fight, and Gran says she can’t wait for Kate to finish high school so she’ll be rid of her at last. Kate decides to take matters into her own hands and discovers that to get what she wants, she may have to reach out to some unexpected people, and find a way to lay down her own anger.

Key Text Features

 

quotations

dialogue

literary references

signs

 

Correlates to the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts:

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.6.2
Determine a theme or central idea of a text and how it is conveyed through particular details; provide a summary of the text distinct from personal opinions or judgments.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.6.5
Analyze how a particular sentence, chapter, scene, or stanza fits into the overall structure of a text and contributes to the development of the theme, setting, or plot.