This story can be read as an inspiring tale of rebellion and unquenchable spirit, although both my daughter and I saw shadows of far darker periods of history in the text: Indian Residential Schools, in which Native American children in the US were shipped off to boarding schools to be striped of their language and culture and indoctrinated; Maoist re-education centers; Stalin's gulags; and Nazi concentration camps, just to name a few.
The story is about a girl, Malley, who leads a rebellion of other girls in her "re-education" class. Her kingdom / country, a fictional Milea, has been conquered by the Wealdans, and the girls are resisting being stripped of all the hallmarks of their culture -- their names , they way they plait their hair, their language, their history (they are being forced to act in a play portraying a general, who butchered their people, that portrays him as a hero). They live in a boarding school, separated from their parents and communities, with strict hierarchies that encourage them to turn on one another, further dividing them.
My daughter finished it and handed it to me with an uncharacteristic dark frown, warning me: "The ending is grim."
It is, for all the author meant it to be triumphant. There is no happy ending here. While the story highlights, above all, the optimism of youth, of resistance to being conquered and fighting back, students of history will surmise the girls are headed to their deaths in the final scene. It was disquieting, and rightly so.
A thought-provoking read, and one of the only fiction children's stories like it I've ever seen, that wasn't directly based on historical fact.
