The Vine: Find That Book Fest V
Submitted by Sarah D. Bunting on September 28, 2007 – 3:29 PM19 Comments
Hey Sars,
Yet another help-me-find-this-book question for the readers, if you don’t know off the top of your head. A book intended for probably the 12-14 audience, or slightly older. Some kind of post-apocalyptic scenario where there is a disease killing off anyone over the age of 12. The 11- and 12-year-olds are stealing cars and forming alliances to survive. That’s about all I remember of it, and I probably read it around 1990?
Thanks in advance for any help from you or the readers!
Wish I’d kept that list of books I’ve read
Dear Wish,
I wish I’d kept a list like that too — and this one actually sounds kind of familiar, although I would have read it earlier, in the mid-’80s. Readers?
Share!
Tags: Ask The Readers popcult
That sounds very much like “The Girl Who Owned A City”, which we read as part of a Lord of the Flies unit in grade 7 (1991). Amazon.com tells me it’s by O.T. Nelson.
I remember it too–that sounds like the right title. I recall that the main character gets shot at one point and her ten year old friend has to take the bullet out. Such a lovely scenario for a ten year old reader!
That book is DEFINITELY “The Girl Who Owned A City.” My 3rd grade teacher read it allowed to us (1986ish) and I always remembered it being called “A Tale of Two Cities,” which led to quite a surprise when I finally read the actual Dickens classic in high school.
Yep, that’s the one. That book totally fascinated me.
Hey, everyone, there is a great online resource for finding books that might actually put an end to the Fest (sorry, Sars!) It’s called abebooks.com. The ABE is for American Book Exchange, and it’s a confederation of independent book sellers who have put their inventories into a searchable online database. Apropos to the Fest, there is a link (found on the lower left of the home page under “More on ABEBooks”) called Book Sleuth, where you can post questions such as these and get answers from book sellers or other readers. I’ve done this with great (and nearly immediate) success twice now, once for a book from my childhood, and once for a book from my husband’s, both fairly obscure and way out of print.
I read it in seventh grade. I really liked that book. For my book report, I wrote a sequel where the main characters go to meet the King of Chicago. I still have that.
That is indeed the book; I hated it very much in eighth grade on the basis that scientifically there could be no disease that killed based on a hard-and-fast age. And I was a very scientific eighth grader. Oh yeah.
Yup, that’s it guys, THANK YOU!!! :D
Most definitely “The Girl Who Owned A City”. We read it in 7th grade, when only some of us would have survived.
As other people have already said? Definitely “The Girl Who Owned A City”. The protagonist ends up being the main force that gets everyone in her neighbourhood to actually pull out of the funk they’re in, just after the grown-ups all die, and start actually planning for the future, since there’s no real *proof* that the disease is going to continue to strike and end up wiping out the entire human race.
As the title states, she ends up owning a city, ’cause she’s the one who organized and planned everything. Some of the other characters object to this, but her response is, pretty much, “Uh, yeah, I *do* own this city. Because *I* was the one who got you all off of your butts and actually *doing* stuff that would help us keep surviving in the future, as well surviving today and tomorrow. If you think you can do the same, you’re free to go build your own city.”
IIRC, it ends with there being rumours of a King of New York (I think it’s New York, anyways) who’s quite expansionist and might be looking to expand in their direction, and some of the characters starting to plan for what they’ll do if those rumours turn out to be true.
Oh, and Leslie? I always figured that it was more “everyone who’s going through or has already gone through puberty died” than “everyone twelve and over died,” and it was just that, for obvious reasons, none of the characters ever heard of the exceptions where someone thirteen survived, or someone ten or eleven died.
I loved The Girl Who Owned a City. I spent so much time preparing for the eventual death of the growed ups, and I started collecting matches. Oh, sixth grade.
I have been searching for this book for 10 years, ever since I started reading it in elementary school but then lost it. Now I can finally figure out how it ended, haha! Thankyou!
Y’all? I read “The Girl Who Owned A City” as a school assignment in the FOURTH GRADE (circa 1986) and I still love it. Thanks, NJ Catholic Schooling, for my unending fascination with post-apocalyptic society!
Definitely “The Girl Who Owned a City,” and that was one of my favorite books of my fifth grade year.
Thanks to Karen for the link to ABE – I was able to get an old book mystery solved in a matter of minutes. I could only remember the vaguest details of this book I loved as a kid. The strangest thing: I unwittingly wound up naming my daughter after the heroine!
I am from that place (Glen Ellyn) and I’m just excited that someone else who is NOT from that city (which is really a township, but I digress. . .) has read it. I just assumed we were reading it (in 6th grade) because it was about our town. Who knew?
Just another chime in to say I read that book growing up and loved it.
I always thought it was called “Lisa’s City” I could not remember the actual name though! I was happy reading through this- thank you for the title! I read it when I was in 6th grade- it was required reading and I absolutely loved it. I think I read it a couple more times after that. I remember vividly the opening scenes of Lisa and her brother going through peoples houses to find supplies of food and such, and then creating booby traps between their house and neighboring houses with the few kids in that area to make a stand against the slightly older bullies. And then eventually using a school to make a city. And that was where it ended- just before she would turn the age she might die at. It was an awesome book! Nice to see other people remember it too!