Deborah Ellis,
No Safe Place
Groundwood Books/House of Anansi Press, 2010.

Rating: E*

With No Safe Place Deborah Ellis continues her use of dramatic international situations to inform young readers of the challenges faced by youth born in less fortunate conditions. This novel shows how the European Union, in opening its borders to provide financial opportunities, has also become a conduit for economic refugees attempting to reach the west.

The novel follows three teens in their travels, and reveals their backstories through flashback chapters. Abdul left post-war Baghdad after his father and brothers were killed in war, his mother and sister were killed by Muslim extremists, and his best friend Kalil is beaten to death in a homophobic attack. Rosalia is a Roma girl whose parents are dead, and her uncle sends her with a man who he hopes will protect her from further sexual violations by providing her with work in a factory and the opportunity for education. The man is soon revealed as a sex trafficker, who imprisons her in an apartment in Berlin in preparation for a life of prostitution. Cheslav's mother abandons him to a Baby Home for Russian orphans, and from there he is moved by government officials to an army cadet training academy. There he discovers a talent and love for the trumpet, and must escape to avoid the inevitable army tour of duty.

All of these teens are desperate enough to risk everything they have left - their life savings, and their physical safety - to travel across Europe to Calais, and then to take an open motorboat across the English Channel with a smuggler, in the hope of a better life. The trip is a horror show: the smuggler attempts to kill his own nephew, and the teens must knock him overboard and leave him to die. They then meet a luxury cruise boat, but when the men aboard discover heroin on the little motorboat,  the teens hijack the cruiser. A terrible storm comes up, and they are only able to land safely through the courage of a little girl who is skipping school to spend time in her "happy place", a small cave in the cliffs at Cornwall. With her mother's help, the teens are given warm clothes, some good meals, restored faith in humanity, and hope for the future.

Ellis's characters are realistic, her situations are based on today's newspaper headlines, and her plot is gripping.  This novel will be very successful for students who are willing to look at the wider social problems of our world, or for classroom instruction on international issues and the challenges faced by youth in different cultures and countries. 

Thematic Links: Immigrants' Stories;  European Union; Roma; War in Iraq; Russia

Patricia Jermey
Vol. 16, number 2
December 2010

*Rating System:
E - Excellent, enduring, everyone should see it!
G - Good, even great at times, generally useful!
A - Average, all right, has its applications.
P - Problematic, puzzling, poorly presented.