Free Lunch: a review

Title: Free Lunch

Author: Rex Ogle

Publisher: Norton Young Readers

Pages: 206

My rating: ⭐⭐ (and a half)

Who will like it? I picked this book up as a throwback to how much I loved reading YALSA books (including my favourites like Bomb by Steve Sheinkin and The Family Romanov by Candace Fleming in middle school). Rex Ogle writes for children in poverty, to help them realize that they are not alone in their struggles.

This book is a memoir written by Rex Ogle, where he recalls his sixth-grade self growing up with a lot of financial hardship in Texas, with her mom, step-brother, and her mom’s boyfriend. From a kid’s point of view, his life was optimistically unpleasant. He was terrified of his peers at school noticing him being poor, or that he lived in government-subsidized housing, or that his shoes were so broken his toes peeped through. His family didn’t know where their next meal came from, and he slept in a sleeping bag with cardboard boxes, and his tiny room was infested with cockroaches. His family ate at McDonald’s and his mother kept calling the franchise to complain about customer service only for free coupons because she didn’t know what else to do. And little Rex had nobody to lean on, because his mother was so hurt she hurt everyone in her family and blamed the unending household problems on the people closest to her. But Rex understood their situation, managed to be mature, cared for his mother in her break-downs, and made the most out of the life he had.

More than 37% of students even on UBC’s campus have financial barriers and constraints to purchasing food, which afflicts a series of problems on students’ wellbeing and academic performance. There are children growing up in poverty in Canada, and around the world, and they’re faced with a host of problems, some we don’t even think about — maintaining dignity, surviving peer pressure, enduring family conflicts, and taking on much more responsibility at a younger age. Ogle takes us with him through these problems that link together and play out his life, and shows us how difficult it is for his tired mother, his kind Abuela, his little brother, and even his best friend, to understand how it feels to be a kid growing up in a home like his.

This is a children’s book, but I picked it up because I think the author addresses an important and pressing problem. I only gave it a mediocre star rating because I wish it went into more depth about these issues and I wish it delivered something more compelling and thoughtful rather than just the surface layer. But for the average person living in poverty, nobody cares about the mechanisms or explanations. That isn’t what this book is written for! For a child, this book also may feel a little random and bland, but for another child, they may cherish every lunch and every punch Ogle experienced, depending on their own life experience.