In the Eighties, kids got to learn about the apocalypse every day! Nuclear war books got big with titles like Yorkshire-set, despair-chic Brother in the Land, the sci-fi-heavy Children of the Dust, Point Horror's take on nuclear apocalypse, After the Bomb, and Whitley Strieber's Wolf of Shadows, which gave us nuclear winter from a wolf's POV. But the Seventies still managed to give kids a taste of the horrors of the end of the world in a variety of books. There's the weird, low budget fake-out of 1973's The Day the World Went Away, the nuclear war classic Z for Zachariah, and my personal favorite, 1975's The Girl Who Owned a City.
A year has passed since a virus killed everyone in the world over the age of 12. Lisa Nelson is ten and she keeps herself and her six year old brother, Todd, alive by looting abandoned houses full of mummified corpses, occasionally reading suicide notes and goodbye letters from the families that lived there to remind herself that grown-ups once existed.
It actually doesn’t sound too bad, except Lisa's leafy suburb is running out of houses to loot, which means they're also running out of food, aspirin, band aids, pretty much everything. The kids are constantly hungry, scared, tired, and cranky. But Lisa, using logic and rational thought, teaches herself to drive and goes to the farms on the edge of their Illinois suburb where she finds plenty of food. Unfortunately, other kids have formed the Chidester Gang under the leadership of lazy ass Tom Logan and they steal everything she brings back. Even worse, the kids on her block are too scared to stop them.
And this is when things get...weird.
O.T. Nelson was the founder of the largest and most successful house painting business in America and he was a devout proponent of Libertarian and Objectivist principles. He also believed that teen fiction was the best way to spread them. The Girl Who Owned a City was his only book and while I read it over and over as a kid because it was basically an end-times version of survival classic, My Side of the Mountain, it's also Randian propaganda.
Lisa, named after Nelson's own daughter, recovers from the Chidester Gang's raid by reasoning that the looted nearby grocery stores must have gotten their food from somewhere and she drives until she discovers a grocery warehouse with plenty of food and supplies. She tells the kids on her block she’ll give them some of it, but it’s HER property and she’ll dole it out the way she wants. In a move designed to get Objectivist readers pumping their fists in the air, she assures the starving kids on her block that she will burn the warehouse to the ground rather than share anything against her will.
She organizes a militia, and demands that even the five-year-olds learn to rig booby traps and throw Molotov cocktails if they want to eat, and when the Chidester gang comes back to offer Lisa a food-for-protection deal, she tells Tom Logan to stuff it with his collectivist bullshit and then she and her child militia hand the Chidester Gang their asses.
Lisa also discovers a “Very Important Book” that’s probably by Ayn Rand although Nelson never says so, and she builds her child militia into a child army, telling them Libertarian fairy tales about achieving your maximum human potential with absolutely no help from anyone else whatsoever because that is the capital T Truth. She turns the local high school into a walled city called Glenbard where she can give them even more lectures on Libertarianism, and when the Chidester Gang return with their own army, her heavily armed child soldiers pour boiling oil on them and drill them full of hot lead.
But Lisa gets shot during the battle and Tom Logan takes over Glenbard. Depressed, a wounded Lisa gets dragged to a farmhouse by some trusted lieutenants where she drinks whiskey and digs the bullet out of her arm with a knife. Realizing that her life has no meaning without a large group of children to harangue, Lisa retakes Glenbard in a commando raid. She finds Tom Logan all alone in her old tower office, but he turns the tables on her and pulls a gun. Daring him to shoot her, Lisa deploys her favorite weapon: another lecture about Libertarianism.
“What good is your life, Tom? What fun is there in your kind of dirty business? Why do you need slaves, or soldiers, who are afraid of you? You know, Tom, you haven’t the guts to depend on your own resources. No! You’d rather be tough and take what someone else has worked hard for. Do you have any idea what this city cost me, Tom? I didn’t force anyone to help me — I didn’t steal anything that belonged to anyone else. I used my head, Tom, and I built Glenbard. And then you came along with your ragged army and your guns and decided that my work was ripe for the harvest. You’re afraid, Tom Logan, of life and your ability to earn your way through it with your own resources.”
Desperate to make her speech end, Tom glumly hands over his gun and without another word retreats from Glenbard, longing for a peaceful, quiet place of his own where he can live out his days with no one lecturing him on defunct political philosophies. Lisa and her child army retake the city but when the kids demand she give a speech, Lisa finds herself strangely reluctant:
“What do they want from me? Today they follow me and cheer me, and tomorrow they’ll call me crazy. I wish I could tell them the truth, but it wouldn’t make sense to them. They have to discover it for themselves. They have to learn to earn for themselves. Wouldn’t it be an absurd thing if I tried to give it to them, or if I tried to make them learn? Imagine being forced into goodness or happiness.”
The book ends on this ominous note, with the threat of another long, hectoring speech from Lisa waiting in the wings, but with Lisa unsure that anyone deserves to hear it. The reader must learn to live beneath this dangling Sword of Damocles, much as we learned to live in the Seventies and Eighties under the threat of imminent nuclear annihilation. And that's the moral quandry posed by The Girl Who Owned a City. While it was nice that Nelson was telling kids they could survive the end of the world by their wits, if survival meant getting endless lectures from Libertarian whackjobs, maybe it would be better to have died in the plague?
Nelson threatened to write sequels that promised even more lectures from Lisa but, as Wikipedia puts it, "...the author has published nothing further and Mr. Nelson currently lives in Minnesota." And, as we all know, once you live in Minnesota it's game over.