Gutter Child

Gutter Child is an unflinching, angry examination of systemic racist injustice. Richardson creates a post-apocalyptic scenario combining elements of colonialism, slavery, Jim Crow laws and current economic disparity, showing the devastating effects on individuals, families and society when the world is designed for some people to fail.

Mainlanders invaded Sossi land and defeated the Sossi in a costly war. Now, Sossi are forced to live in the Gutter, and every Sossi child is born with a debt to the Mainland that they spend their whole lives working off and often pass on to their children. The promise of Redemption Freedom, paying off their debt and being free to leave the Gutter, motivates Sossi to put up with terrible working conditions. Some hope to earn Freedom sooner by sending their children to Academies on the Mainland where they are trained in blue-collar work and hired out to Mainlanders for more money than they could make in the Gutter—but with a significant commission going to the Academies and the workers’ debt managers.

Elimina was born in the Gutter but raised by a Mainlander as part of a social experiment. She faced racism and discrimination, but her adopted mother genuinely loved her and Elimina lived in relative luxury. When her Mainlander mother dies, however, Elimina is sent to Livingstone Academy and learns for the first time about her debt.

She develops a relationship with a boy at the Academy and, when she becomes pregnant, she is sent to a “Home for Troubled Girls”. Here, after learning that her child will be taken from her, Elimina delivers her baby in secret and voluntarily goes to the Gutter. She and her child will live in poverty, but they will be together. The book ends on the marginally hopeful note that a resistance Network has managed to wring a few concessions from the Mainlanders that will slightly improve life in the Gutter, and Elimina has set up a home for her and her son with a supportive friend.

Gutter Child is a difficult book to read, and it is meant to be. Richardson begins with a warning to “take care with your heart and your mind as you read”. Every character in the book is having their soul crushed in some way by the terrible system they are living under, and there is no magical solution. Richardson, through the multiple characters Elimina encounters, examines multiple different ways people have to contort themselves to live in this world.

The children at the Academy are manipulated and punished to keep them in line. Elimina is given a Red Coat and told she must enforce the rules or be punished herself. The children find ways to rebel—sneaking out to read poetry in the barn—but their trust in each other is continually broken when they are forced to tell on each other, and the promise of Redemption Freedom works to pit them against each other, competing for limited “good” work contracts. Because some Sossi adults work at the Academy to pay off their debt, readers are able to see the compromises they have made, being complicit with the system in the vague hope that they can win Redemption Freedom for their families.

Hiring fairs for teenage Academy graduates are slave markets with a coat of whitewash, but they are also models of modern-day poverty when the disadvantaged are told they just need to work hard to get ahead, but the wages they are paid make it impossible. The logic used by the Mainlanders to justify their system of oppression sounds eerily similar to arguments heard today explaining away this sort of racially-based disparity. The Mainlanders are universally villains, but they are shown as individuals with different motivations and different levels of belief in the justifications they spout. Their souls are being twisted by the system as well.

An added layer of nuance is the society of free Sossi who live on the Hill because their ancestors essentially sold out the rest of the Sossi. Elimina sees the Hill as a beacon of hope, but the narrative questions whether the Sossi living there are really helping anyone or just maintaining their own privileges.

In the Gutter, tensions arise between family members who will do anything to get out, including sending their children to Academies at a young age, and those determined to make life work in the Gutter where they can keep their families together. There are scenes in the book showing supportive mentorship and friendship and a sense of community, and all through the narrative the Network is referred to as a source of help and hope. But anything positive is hard-won and tenuous; Gutter Child is a relentlessly realistic story.

Elimina’s in-between status as a Sossi raised by a Mainlander makes her the ideal entry point for readers into this difficult world. Readers discover each new unfairness as Elimina discovers it and each impossible choice as she is forced to make it. The first-person narration reflects her fears and confusion, her struggles to find friendship and support, and her growing determination to find a place to stand.

The pacing is sometimes slow as there is a lot of narrative ground to cover, but the characters are all well-drawn and engaging. Gutter Child will appeal to readers of hard-hitting contemporary novels like Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give. Gutter Child would also be an excellent book to begin a class discussion of institutionalized racism and would go along with any study of Black Lives Matter, poverty, privilege and the notion of economic slavery.