Outside the Gates [Hardcover]

Molly Gloss (Author)

Book Description

Age Level: 9 and up

Vren, exiled into the dark forest outside the Gates, finds a new life with a friendly weather-worker, until their gentle existence is disrupted by a spellbinder misusing his power.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Because he can talk to animals, Vren is exiled to the forbidding forest outside the walls of his homeland. He is certain that he will die, as have others forced to wait at the gates. Then he is adopted, first by another exile, the gruff weather-worker Rusche, and then by a family of wolves. His peaceful new life is interrupted when Rusche is kidnapped by a spellbinder who has enslaved several of the psychic outcasts to do his bidding. With only a wolf as his companion, Vren sets out to free his friend. A certain vagueness in background details may raise questions in readers' minds, but on the whole this serious fable (a first novel) will win them over, with pockets of human warmth lighting up corners of a dark, dangerous world.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal

Grade 4-6 Vren, an outcast because of his psychic abilities, is befriended by Rusche, a weather worker, and finds life good until Rusche disappears. With his companions Shel the seer and Trim the wolf, Vren searches for him, finding that Rusche, along with many others, has been captured by the Spellbinder, who steals souls. The conflict is cerebral and symbolic, and because the characters are ciphers, this mental conflict is bland and will not hold the interest of most readers. Holly Sanhuber, Muskego Public Library, Wis.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 9 and up
  
• Hardcover: 120 pages
• Publisher: Atheneum; First Edition edition (September 1986)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 068931275X
• ISBN-13: 978-0689312755
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,843,156 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

How I got started writing, etc., is a long story you can read on my website. But here are the highlights of my writing life: In 1996 I received a prestigious Whiting Writers Award--sort of a MacArthur grant in a minor key. But nobody knows what the heck it is, so how did it come to be prestigious?! Probably it's the substantial chunk of change they drop on your head without warning. ("Substantial" of course being a relative term. It's not MacArthur substantial. But we paid off our house!) The Jump-Off Creek is usually referred to as "a Pacific Northwest classic" and was winner of an Oregon Book Award and a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, and a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. The Dazzle of Day, which is a science fiction novel, received the PEN West Fiction Prize and was a New York Times Notable Book. Fairly unusual for a science fiction novel to win a major PEN prize, but the Notable Book thing, not so much--it was Notable only within the ghetto of science fiction. Go figure. Wild Life, set in the woods and mountains of Washington State at the turn of the 20th century, won the James Tiptree Award for literary fantasy, although at the time I wrote it I didn't think I was writing anything fantastical. My newest, The Hearts of Horses, has been the most popular of any of my works. Not sure why. Is it that attention-grabbing cover? or "horses" in the title?!