Book Review: Deliver Us from Evie

| By: Committee for Children

by M. E. Kerr
Reading Level: Middle school and older

Eighteen-year-old Evie Burrman is an excellent farmhand. Skilled at mechanics and farming, strong, smart, and comfortable with farm talk, she is the apple of her father’s eye. She is also a lesbian. In her family’s rural Missouri community, that is the salient fact about Evie, regardless of how good she is at repairing combines. Her quietly observant 16-year-old brother Parr watches their family and neighbors handle their dawning understanding that Evie’s difference is not just a stage that can be erased by wearing feminine clothing and makeup, as her mother likes to think. When Evie and the wealthy banker’s daughter Patty fall in love, tensions skyrocket. Nothing is ever simple: Patty’s father holds the mortgage on the Burrman family farm; Cord Whittle, one of the workers on the farm, is in love with Evie; and Parr is worried that Evie will decide to escape from the narrow horizons of farm life, leaving him to take on the family business. Meanwhile, Parr himself is falling for a girl whose family attends the “holy roller” church, and Evie’s other brother, Doug, has a new sorority girlfriend who is highly scornful of farming. In spite of Parr’s acceptance of Evie, a night out with Cord leads Parr to a rash act that brings the situation to a head.

Social and Emotional Lessons in Deliver Us from Evie

Everyone feels out of the norm at one time or another. It’s not only Evie who is “different” in this novel. Whether it’s religion, class, money, or sexual orientation, each character has a particular lens through which he or she sees.

Although the events in Deliver Us from Evie presumably take place in the early 1990s, the discomfort so many of the characters feel with others who are different from themselves is still very much in evidence in the 21st century. The Second Step and Steps to Respect programs encourage young people to understand and apply perspective-taking skills. In Deliver Us from Evie, the Burrman family experiences a crash course in perspective taking, from spending time with a family from a once-feared and -ridiculed religion, to facing the fact that all three children are going to have to make their own career choices, to accepting that Evie, as the town sheriff says, “is what she is, and whatever that is, it hasn’t bothered anyone before.”

 

Older Second Step students also learn to recognize and identify bullying within social or friendship groups, and to recognize that all people are individuals beyond a label or stereotype and that labels, stereotypes, and prejudice can lead to bullying or unfair treatment of others. Living in a tight-knit community as the Burrmans do means that every action, every quirk of personality, every choice, is under close scrutiny, for better or worse. What seems like the “right” choice can easily have political or even financial consequences. Kerr depicts the subtle complexities of community behavior, including the threat that many feel when confronting something—or someone—not like themselves.

Classroom Activity

By middle school, most children have experienced bullying in some way, whether as instigator, target, or bystander. Have students write two letters. The first letter is to any character in Deliver Us from Evie, expressing empathy, concern, anger, identification, or any other strong emotion this character elicited in the reader/writer. The second letter doesn’t have to be turned in. Students should write this letter to a person with whom they were involved in a bullying incident. The writer may have been in a direct or peripheral role, but must address one individual with empathy, perspective, an open mind, and any other emotion that person elicited in the letter writer.