Children’s literature is lousy with dead parents. Also nefarious and neglectful ones. Adulticide is often crucial if a story’s wee fictional humans are going to have adventures worth reading about. The allure of “The Boxcar Children,” for instance, about four orphans living in an abandoned train car, diminishes if the kids are playing orphan in a refrigerator crate.

Razzi, the 12-year-old narrator of Jennifer L. Holm’s excellent new novel, OUTSIDE (Scholastic, 240 pp., $17.99, ages 9 to 12), feels an affinity with the boxcar children. But unlike those kids, who “got to wander all over the place and have adventures,” Razzi, her little brother and four other children are “stuck in the boxcar,” as she puts it, watched by their parents in a fortified estate called the Refuge. They are survivors of the Great Poisoning more than a decade earlier, when “some stupid country … used a space weapon that showered poison down from the sky.”

Razzi accepts her circumstances — they’re all she’s known. She witnessed the dangers of Outside firsthand when she saw Ollie, another child in the Refuge, itching to explore, fall off the roof. “He’d wanted so badly to experience the Outside that he had died trying,” Razzi mourns.

After a medical examination reveals that Razzi needs a new heart, she receives a transplant from a greyhound named Wind. That may sound bonkers, but it’s not, at least not in the capable hands of Holm (the award-winning author of “Turtle in Paradise,” the Babymouse series and the Sunny series), who makes Razzi’s world utterly believable to both Razzi and, at least initially, the reader.

With Wind’s heart come changes: an allergy to chocolate, visions of the dog’s previous life and an urge to go to the one place Razzi has been taught to fear. “Was this the Wind part of me? Or was it just me? I was Outside, and I knew I had to run.”

Run she does. Adventures ensue, but so do many questions about what makes a dystopia. The result is a book that’s thinky and deep and also a hell of a ride. Kids will devour it. Adults, on the other hand, may feel unsettled by this uncomfortable trope: the well-meaning grown-ups who do everything to protect their children — and fail.

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