What The Girl Who Owned A City Actually Is
The Girl Who Owned A City is a 1975 post-apocalyptic young adult novel by O.F. LaPorte about a twelve-year-old girl named Lisa Suzuki who takes charge of her town after a mysterious disease wipes out almost all adults. The kids run everything. They build shelters, establish order, and deal with the threat of adult outlaws called "the takers" who still roam the countryside. It is not particularly deep literary fiction. The prose is functional, the themes are familiar, and the world-building has gaps you can drive a truck through. But the premise works on its surface level, and for what it is, it gets the job done.
The Girl Who Owned A City book summary
The story opens with Lisa trying to care for her younger brother David after their parents die. She leads a group of kids in their small town, organizing food distribution, defending against raids, and maintaining some kind of functional society. The antagonist is a gang of adults led by a man named Gordon who prey on the children. Eventually Lisa and her people capture Gordon and decide what to do with him, which becomes the central moral question of the book. The film adaptation from 1987 stars Kevin Hynes as Lisa and features some competent production values for a straight-to-video budget. The book is shorter and more focused than the movie, which adds quite a bit of filler.
How To Read Or Watch It
Since the book went out of print for a while, availability has been spotty. The original Tor edition from 1975 is the standard text, and later reprintings exist from Scholastic and other publishers. Digital versions circulate on project Gutenberg and similar archives, though those are public domain copies that may not include the most current errata. If you want the cleanest reading experience, a used paperback from Amazon or eBay will run you about five to ten dollars depending on condition. The 1987 film is harder to track down legally. It was a Canadian production that did not get wide theatrical distribution, so major streaming platforms tend to skip it. You can sometimes find it on Tubi or Freevee as an ad-supported title, or rent it through Amazon Video for a few dollars. The DVD exists but is largely out of print, so any physical copy you find will be a used market purchase.
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Why People Still Talk About It
The premise has a certain straightforward appeal. A child in charge during societal collapse is not a brand-new idea, but LaPorte handles it with enough practical detail that it feels grounded rather than purely fantastical. Lisa is not superhuman. She makes mistakes, she gets scared, and she has to delegate tasks she does not fully understand. That restraint keeps the story from becoming pure wish fulfillment. The takers as antagonists represent a recognizable human type rather than a cartoonish evil. They are adults who refused to accept that the world changed, who kept operating on old assumptions about power and authority. That conflict between children who adapted and adults who could not is the thematic engine of the book, and it carries through without heavy-handed moralizing.
Things The Book Does Not Do Well
The romance subplot between Lisa and a boy named Tommy feels tacked on and underdeveloped. It appears late in the narrative and does not connect to anything meaningful in the rest of the story. Some readers find it distracting; others skim past it. Your mileage will depend on how much you mind that kind of genre convention. The treatment of gender and leadership is also somewhat conventional for 1970s children's literature. Lisa proves herself capable, which was progressive for its time, but the book does not push far beyond that boundary. The supporting cast includes several competent girls, which is worth noting, but the narrative focus stays narrowly on Lisa and her immediate circle.
Related Media And Follow-Ups
LaPorte did not write a direct sequel, but the 1990 TV movie "The Girl Who Owned a City: A Post-Human Story" continued some threads loosely. It is generally considered inferior to the original and changes several character details. If you read the book first, treat the movie as a separate entity rather than a continuation worth your time unless you have specific curiosity about how the property was handled decades later. The 1987 feature film changes the ending significantly and adds action sequences that the book never contained. Both approaches work on their own terms, but they tell different stories. If you are trying to understand the source material, the book is the reference point. If you want entertainment, either version delivers something acceptable.
Who Should Read This
The target audience is middle grade to young adult, roughly ages ten to fourteen, though adults who grew up with it often recommend it nostalgically. The themes of responsibility, community organization, and moral choice during crisis give it some substance beyond the adventure surface. Readers looking for sophisticated prose or complex political theory will find it wanting. Readers looking for a straightforward story about kids handling an impossible situation will probably enjoy it. It is not essential reading in any literary sense. It is a competent example of its genre, written by someone who understood what that genre required and delivered it without unnecessary embellishment. That is a fair assessment and probably all the praise it deserves.
