I discovered Jael Richardson during Canada Reads 2020. If you’re a fan, be sure to follow her on Instagram for the best post-show breakdown each day of the debates. It was only after that I learned she is a director for The Festival of Literary Diversity, CBC columnist, and even before writing Gutter Child was a published author (need any more reasons to give her a follow?).

Gutter Child is a book about a world where there are two castes of people: those born “Mainland”, who are white, privileged, and on the winning side of an historic war, and “gutter people”, people of colour, descendants of the losers of that same war, who are born with a portion of an intergenerational debt of war reparations, and live as indentured servants to Mainland folk to repay it. 

Elimina is a Gutter Child raised in the Mainland as a social experiment to determine if Gutter people can be civilized. But when her foster family dies, she is sent to a school to prepare her for servitude. It is there that she meets other Gutter people, connects with her cultural history, and sees first hand the racism, classism, and prejudice that she experienced growing up in a white community isn’t only her experience, but it is systemic-- the very foundation of her society. 

This was such a good book. Jael builds a deep world and sympathy for Elimina in very little time, allowing the plot progress almost immediately. It was a read that I felt hooked into within pages of starting and it was very hard to put down. Little pieces of exposition into the world and Elimina’s history are scattered both through dialogue and the things left unsaid. As a reader, one can easily draw parallels between the racism, prejudice, and privilege in Mainside to our world, but the book also does not read like a moralistic fable. It definitely stands on its own feet as an excellent story that can also be used as a magnifying glass on our own world. 

I’d strongly recommend this book to anybody looking for something engaging, interesting, and satisfying to read.