Deborah Ellis’ three books about Parvana, an Afghan girl trying desperately to survive in a war-torn country, have been well-deserved best sellers lately.  In Looking for X, Ellis returns the setting to her native Canada but the focus is still a girl struggling against her world. 

Khyber is 12, her twin brothers are autistic and her mother is an ex-stripper trying to raise the three kids on her own. Faced with everyday problems of urban poverty, school bullying, and simply growing up, Khyber dreams of being a great explorer, discovering the world. 

She has a friend, X, an old homeless woman who thinks secret police are after her. Khyber sneaks her sandwiches and tries to protect her, as she does her brothers, against that great outside world she wants to explore. 

But when that outside world threatens to destroy the fragile security of her family, Khyber must become that explorer, desperately searching the city for the missing X.  

This could be a soap opera, as Khyber and her family seem always one step away from tragedy.  It, most certainly, is not.  Ellis creates a tightly suspenseful world through Khyber’s voice, balancing the events that the reader can see and judge, with the reactions that a 12 year old narrator expresses. 

While the love, warmth and loyalty of Khyber and her family is a vital element in the story, she can also be sulky, disobedient and disastrously wrong.  Fiercely protective of her brothers, she will even battle her mother for them.  Her journey through the homeless haunts of Ontario is a sobering reminder of what she, and the reader, still has. 

Like the Parvana books, Ellis has created a thought-provoking and sensitive story.  She shows us a world that is, on the surface, unlike our own.  But she also shows that the similarities, in the people and their problems and their struggles, are disturbingly close to home.

Other books by Deborah Ellis:
Parvana (Allen & Unwin, 2002)
Parvana's Journey (Allen & Unwin, 2002)
Shauzia (Allen & Unwin, 2003)
A Company of Fools (Allen & Unwin, 2004)

Review by David Beagley

© 2003 David Beagley