Starbird Murphy and the World Outside by Karen Finneyfrock (review)

Life with the Free Family on their Washington farm is all that Starbird has known, and she’s mostly content, despite missing the Family’s leader, EARTH, who has been away for several years. When an opportunity opens up to work at the Free Family’s restaurant in Seattle, however, she takes it, mostly because she’s been hurt by the boy she likes. Now at sixteen she’s attending school for the first time, using her excellent head for math to try to pull the restaurant out of the red, and discovering that the Free Family members in the Seattle house don’t all share Starbird’s faith in EARTH and the Family. Her rediscovery of her long-lost brother, who left the Family three years ago, complicates her view of the Family still further, and she’s torn between her long-held beliefs and her growing unease about the Family’s secrets and ways. As with other novels about sheltered teens encountering a startlingly heterogeneous world (such as Cantor’s Searching for Sky, BCCB 6/14) this one maps well onto normal teenaged rejection and individuation; Finneyfrock also engagingly conveys the outsider’s view of the daily life most of readers take for granted (money, for instance, is both a physical and a conceptual taboo in the Family). Though there is indeed corruption in the high levels of the Family (it was EARTH’s henchman who drove Starbird’s brother out, and there’s money being siphoned off to EARTH under his pre-Family name), the book has more nuance than some about intentional communities, and Starbird’s eventual challenge to the community calls out fraud and lies without dismissing the utopian ideal itself. Starbird’s gently growing romance with a nice accounting-capable classmate is sweet, and the absorbing situation will prompt lively discussion about independence and belief.