Sit
CBC Books | CBC | Posted: October 17, 2017 8:30 PM | Last Updated: October 17, 2017
Deborah Ellis
The seated child. With a single powerful image, Deborah Ellis draws our attention to nine children and the situations they find themselves in, often through no fault of their own. In each story, a child makes a decision and takes action, be that a tiny gesture or a life-altering choice.
Jafar is a child laborer in a chair factory and longs to go to school. Sue sits on a swing as she and her brother wait to have a supervised visit with their father at the children's aid society. Gretchen considers the lives of concentration camp victims during a school tour of Auschwitz. Mike survives 72 days of solitary as a young offender. Barry squirms on a food court chair as his parents tell him that they are separating. Macie sits on a too-small time-out chair while her mother receives visitors for tea. Noosala crouches in a fetid, crowded apartment in Uzbekistan, waiting for an unscrupulous refugee smuggler to decide her fate.
These children find the courage to face their situations in ways large and small, in this eloquent collection from a master storyteller. (From Groundwood Books)
From the book
Jafar was sitting on a work bench in the furniture factory.
Not sitting, exactly. Perching, like a little bird on the edge of a trash can, ready to take flight at the first sign of danger from a cat or a truck.
Or from the boss storming through looking for slackers.
As he rested his bony little body, Jafar stared into a sunbeam. It was only a second-hand sunbeam, one that bounced off the window of the coffin shop across the lane, but Jafar looked forward to it every day. It meant his workday, which began in Jakarta's pre-dawn gray, was heading toward the end.
From Sit by Deborah Ellis ©2017. Published by Groundwood Books.