Siberia

Ann Halam (author)

Orion Children's Books, UK: 2005; 232pp

ISBN: 1842551299

Note: extension concepts

Genre: science fiction

Issues: community, corruption, ecology, environment, ethics, identity, relationships, values

Set in an environmentally depleted world that has undergone a huge climate change, this is an interesting, yet disturbing novel. Rosita and her mother have been banished from the City to one of the Wilderness Settlements.

Rosita is only four and doesn't realise that they have been condemned to a life of hardship as a punishment for her father's political activities. All she knows is that her Dadda has disappeared, her mother is unhappy and frightened, and they now have to live in a cold, ugly place, where the other children are mean and pick on her for what they consider to be her snobbish city ways.

What Rosita does learn, however, is that her Mama is guarding a magical treasure, something so wonderful that no one else must find out about it. When she is a little older, Rosita's mother teaches her how to perform the magic, how to be the guardian of the secret. Although she doesn't understand the significance of what she is doing, Rosita does know that her mother is trusting her with something very important.

But Rosita grows up. Her community is a ruthless one, where only the tough and self-serving survive. She changes her name to Sloe, after the winter-flowering plant that resists the cold, and learns to obey the tough social laws of her world. Sloe is a bright girl who performs well in her Settlement class. She is sent away from her mother to the New Dawn college, where the children of political prisoners are ‘re-educated' and trained to be loyal only to the government. Although not entirely convinced by the rhetoric, Sloe does what she must to survive - until she realises that with one simple sentence she has unwittingly betrayed her mother, who then disappears. Expelled for her undisciplined behaviour, Sloe returns to the empty Settlement cottage, determined to protect the secret treasure her mother has left behind, and to take alone the dangerous journey that they had planned to take together. In the deepest winter she must travel across the harsh, icy landscape, cross the Narrow Sea, until she comes to the ‘city where the sun always shines' to deliver the treasure that is the hope of the world.

Ann Halam has created a strong, exciting narrative that is a wonderful combination of adventure, science-fiction and fantasy. Sloe is a remarkably complex child. Despite her surroundings, she retains a refreshing innocence, and a faith in people that often gets her into trouble. She is cynical and hopeful, determined but vulnerable. The characters she encounters represent the most likely ways that humans would react if they lived in Sloe's type of world - thieves, manipulators, collaborators, idealists, and those who try to keep their humanity while surviving in a tough world. Siberia is not so much a place as a state of mind - the cold, desolation that is life without hope of change or improvement. Sloe's character epitomises all that is best in the human spirit, the stubborn determination to survive, our need for love, which is what enables our race to do both wonderful and terrible things.

This is a very thought-provoking read. Teachers could tie it into environmental and political studies, and it would work well as a complementary text to Lois Lowry's The Giver, Gathering Blue and Messenger.