Laura Joyce Moriarty

The Misfit Wins Laura Joyce Moriarty

Eizea Jayne Grayson believes herself to be a misfit. After all, she's generally ignored by everyone---even bullied. Ordinarily, such a child would be completely sad, but Eizea has a loving mother who nourishes her ferocious appetite for reading and writing, and supplies her with an endless supply of novels---even some adult novels. When Eizea Jayne reads The Black Rose by Thomas B. Costain, she is transformed by the exotic story of two English knights who travel into the Middle East. There they save a slave from a harem. Eizea is completely ignorant of the word harem and goes to the library and asks for help. At first she is worried. Since her teachers had never trusted her reports of adult level reading, she feared the librarian would scold her. Instead, she is given a reference manual and is shocked to see how women are bought as slaves for harems. At first she wonders if the women wanted to be bought, because sometimes they were smiling, and wore fantastical clothes. The librarian explains: "There are no good lives for slaves of any sort. It would be a better world if there were no slaves anywhere." Initially, Eizea's report is thrown out of the competition because of the subject matter. The School Board objected to the topic and asked her to write on another topic. Instead, her mother decides what she really needs is a school that will nourish her exceptional mind. This discovery transformed Eizea. She writes a winning report on the exploitation of young girls in a state-wide competition. Following her dream, she travels the world as a journalist and writes a Pulitzer Prize winning exposé on sex slaves.