Baldwin is six years old when his mother dies in a car accident. Emotionally devastated, his father remarries too soon, and trouble enters the home. Baldwin and his stepmother don't get along. She locks him out of the house during the day, and emotionally and physically abuses him. Life becomes increasingly difficult and lonely for Baldwin, but he finds comfort through the contact with his grandparents. And because he is a child growing up, he has interesting experiences with girls as well.This subtle novel by Dutch writer and musician David de Poel (Groningen, 1973) is a tale about loneliness, and blunty recounts a young boy's personal experience with death and child abuse. Set in the eighties in Bedum, a village in the provence of Groningen, and exhaling a typically Dutch atmosphere, Locked Out (De Buitenstaander, 2004) carries an universal theme: the powerlessness of a child in pain.