Beyond the Bright Sea

Lauren Wolk is a born writer, and this second novel is in the same league of excellence as its predecessor Wolf Hollow.  Her sentences come in an unforced, natural flow and she has an eye for striking detail. In this story, she draws on her own intimate knowledge of having lived on the Atlantic Ocean for most of her life. Her main character, simply known as Crow, is a twelve-year-old girl, whom some in the island village where she lives suspect of being a so far undiagnosed leper. The year is 1925, and ancient prejudices still run deep. But she is looked after by two ruggedly stalwart characters: Osh, a lone fisherman who took her in when she appeared on the island as an abandoned baby, and Miss Maggie, a no-nonsense neighbour who looks after her education and other things besides. For the most part, Crow and her two supporters continue to live a reasonably contented existence of the type that Robinson Crusoe could well have recognised from his own experience.

There is however plenty of action, some violent, still to come. But this is so rooted in Crow’s account of her everyday living that it seems like one more extra detail rather than any sort of contrived unlikelihood. In between setting lobster pots, harvesting sea weed, picking plants to create the colours that Osh needs for his part-time painting, Crow finally explores Pekinese, the nearby island she originally came from, formerly home to a leper colony now abandoned. After she does, buried jewels, a search for a long lost brother and threats from a maddened treasure-hunter all follow. With some of the detail here taken from events that actually did once take place on Penikese, there is never any danger of this fine novel lapsing into melodrama however tense the action turns. Its main concentration continues to be on Crow’s search for a sense of her true identity in surroundings far from the lives of most modern young readers today and for that reason additionally fascinating.