Ellen Outside the Lines
by A J Sass (Author)
Rain Reign meets Ivy Aberdeen's Letter to the World in this heartfelt novel about a neurodivergent thirteen-year-old navigating changing friendships, a school trip, and expanding horizons.
Thirteen-year-old Ellen Katz feels most comfortable when her life is well planned out and people fit neatly into her predefined categories. She attends temple with Abba and Mom every Friday and Saturday. Ellen only gets crushes on girls, never boys, and she knows she can always rely on her best-and-only friend, Laurel, to help navigate social situations at their private Georgia middle school. Laurel has always made Ellen feel like being autistic is no big deal. But lately, Laurel has started making more friends, and cancelling more weekend plans with Ellen than she keeps. A school trip to Barcelona seems like the perfect place for Ellen to get their friendship back on track.
Except it doesn't. Toss in a new nonbinary classmate whose identity has Ellen questioning her very binary way of seeing the world, homesickness, a scavenger hunt-style team project that takes the students through Barcelona to learn about Spanish culture and this trip is anything but what Ellen planned.
Making new friends and letting go of old ones is never easy, but Ellen might just find a comfortable new place for herself if she can learn to embrace the fact that life doesn't always stick to a planned itinerary.
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Publisher's Weekly
Sass’s (Ana on the Edge) sophomore novel explores classic struggles of navigating identity, relationships, and social expectations via an autistic, queer, Jewish 13-year-old traveling on a class trip to Spain. Having carefully planned out each day based on the previous year’s syllabus, Ellen Katz hopes to reconnect with best friend Laurel McKinley, starting on the flight from Georgia to Barcelona with their mostly white class. But awkwardness with Laurel and an unexpected schedule pivot—to a scavenger hunt with an unfamiliar group of students—leave the teen grasping for stability, despite the presence of Ellen’s beloved Abba as a parent chaperone. Facing changing plans and conflicting loyalties, Ellen finds support in family, faith, and new friends, including nonbinary classmate Isa, who is Latinx. The first-person narration, studded with Hebrew phrases, sympathetically details Ellen’s experiences of social anxiety and sensory overload while paving a route to friends who don’t blink at Ellen’s accommodations—and around whom Ellen enjoys life as well as feels free to consider gender and sexuality. The story’s beautiful locales and scavenger hunt puzzles frame a heartwarming story about a transitional period in life, conveyed alongside an affirming, incidental portrayal of Ellen’s experiences. Ages 8–12.
Copyright 2022 Publishers Weekly LLC Used with Permission
Review quotes
JUV039150 - Juvenile Fiction | Social Themes | Special Needs
JUV060000 - Juvenile Fiction | LGBT
JUV068000 - Juvenile Fiction | Travel
