New World

‘Adventure, treachery and deadly danger – one boy’s journey into the unknown…’ Thus the allurements of the blurb for New World, allurements which, while not, perhaps, offering the most original ingredients in children’s fiction, should succeed in capturing the attention of those young readers with a fondness for historical fiction and, even more especially, of those interested in Tudor seafaring times. The novel concerns itself with the events leading to the establishment, in the 1580s, of the Roanoke colony in what is now North Carolina, the events being perceived through the eyes of Kit Milton, the ‘one boy’ who finds himself on the colonising expedition. It is Kit’s insights into the motives – mixed, to say the least – of those leading the expedition and, even more so, into the relationships which subsequently arise between coloniser and colonised which give the novel its strongest focus, supported by Kit’s need to find through his experiences ‘a good, true life… to be something, to mean something’ as a way of handling his uncertainties about his past. Priestley’s style is workmanlike, his research has clearly been thorough and his blend of fictional and factual detail makes for some lively and atmospheric moments: readers on the Irish side of the Irish Sea will find the various references to their country particularly intriguing.