feather_ghyll (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
feather_ghyll) wrote2020-07-25 10:03 am
feather_ghyll) wrote2020-07-25 10:03 am
REVIEW: Bright Island
Bright Island: Mabel L. Robinson, Hutchinson
You make assumptions when you pick up the next book on your ‘to be read’ pile, some of them encouraged by its design and age. In my defence, Hutchinson boasts that this is published in the same series as ‘Christine, Air Hostess’ and ‘The Intelligence Corps Saves The Island’, which I’ve read, although I haven’t reviewed them here. I don’t remember being impressed by either. So, I prepared myself for some children, probably girls, having not entirely credible adventures on an island. Well, it’s always salutary and a pleasure to have assumptions smashed to smithereens by something far better.
As I read the first couple of pages, describing the island and explaining how it came by its name, I thought, ‘She can write!’ and as I continued reading, nothing changed that conviction. For we are then introduced to the inhabitants of Bright Island, off the coast of Maine, and unusually, we meet the parents of the heroine before the heroine herself, setting her in her context.
The heroine is one Thankful Curtis, age undetermined – her unusual name has a backstory. It’s worth noting that she is the seventh child, although only four of her brothers survived, and the only daughter, the last of the children on the island, in fact. The story is her coming of age. She’s still a child at the start, a wild creature, happiest outside, sailing, and still suffering from her first real grief after the death of her grandfather, her boon companion. Thankful is impatient of family get-togethers, where her brothers return to the island with their wives, ‘the girls’, who don’t understand Thankful and whom she doesn’t understand either. Thankful gets on better with Dave, a friend who once lived on the island and who is hoping to start a career on the sea, or Limpy, a tame gull she looks after.
By the by, these four brothers and their wives do have children, but Mary and Jonathan Curtis’s grandchildren never seem to visit the island, though you’d think that they’d love it. Perhaps they’re all at the dangerous toddler stage.
I don’t want to give too much away, the book is in several parts and almost covers a year of big changes for Thankful, and I’ve only sketched out the first part, leaving out perhaps the most important thing.
It was first published in 1937, I wasn’t entirely sure when it was set whilst reading it, although there’s a reference to Greta Garbo in a film adaptation of Anna Karenina, the threat of planes to ships and talk of girdles, which Thankful hates violently. When I did some research after finishing the book, I learned it was runner-up for a Newberry medal, and I’m really not surprised, it is that good. Robinson absolutely gets under Thankful’s skin, and makes us feel her growing pains. They are perhaps exacerbated by being a far from wealthy islander given the chance to go to a boarding school, a co-educational boarding school, no less, where she’s tested, the experience of a different life giving her perspective on her home. She also leaves her mark on the school.
Like Arthur Ransome, Robinson has a way of using sailing metaphors to express what is going on with her heroine, but this is aimed at an older readership, and for all that it was first published in the 1930s (which means the second world war lies ahead for the characters), it genuinely is a ‘young adult’ book, which always struck me as an American construct. Thankful learns ‘what a girl is for’ in her father’s words, which are gnomic to her at the start of the book. So, there is a crush, disappointment, an offhand proposal and what strikes one now as completely inappropriate attention from a Latin school master.
I’ve changed my mind about a sudden and dramatic event that happens towards the end of the book. On first reading it, I thought it was a bit of a deus ex machina, but learning more about the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, which Robinson (born in 1874) would have lived through, I found the unexpected, sudden serious sickness more credible. Through it, Thankful learns that she doesn’t just take after her grandfather.
However, there are a few editing errors in my copy, worst of all in the final sentence. (And now, let’s hope I caught all of my typos in this review.) But this is easily the best children/young adult book I’ve read this year; while reading it, I was certainly transported from my home to Maine.
[Edited 25/3/23 for a typo.]
You make assumptions when you pick up the next book on your ‘to be read’ pile, some of them encouraged by its design and age. In my defence, Hutchinson boasts that this is published in the same series as ‘Christine, Air Hostess’ and ‘The Intelligence Corps Saves The Island’, which I’ve read, although I haven’t reviewed them here. I don’t remember being impressed by either. So, I prepared myself for some children, probably girls, having not entirely credible adventures on an island. Well, it’s always salutary and a pleasure to have assumptions smashed to smithereens by something far better.
As I read the first couple of pages, describing the island and explaining how it came by its name, I thought, ‘She can write!’ and as I continued reading, nothing changed that conviction. For we are then introduced to the inhabitants of Bright Island, off the coast of Maine, and unusually, we meet the parents of the heroine before the heroine herself, setting her in her context.
The heroine is one Thankful Curtis, age undetermined – her unusual name has a backstory. It’s worth noting that she is the seventh child, although only four of her brothers survived, and the only daughter, the last of the children on the island, in fact. The story is her coming of age. She’s still a child at the start, a wild creature, happiest outside, sailing, and still suffering from her first real grief after the death of her grandfather, her boon companion. Thankful is impatient of family get-togethers, where her brothers return to the island with their wives, ‘the girls’, who don’t understand Thankful and whom she doesn’t understand either. Thankful gets on better with Dave, a friend who once lived on the island and who is hoping to start a career on the sea, or Limpy, a tame gull she looks after.
By the by, these four brothers and their wives do have children, but Mary and Jonathan Curtis’s grandchildren never seem to visit the island, though you’d think that they’d love it. Perhaps they’re all at the dangerous toddler stage.
I don’t want to give too much away, the book is in several parts and almost covers a year of big changes for Thankful, and I’ve only sketched out the first part, leaving out perhaps the most important thing.
It was first published in 1937, I wasn’t entirely sure when it was set whilst reading it, although there’s a reference to Greta Garbo in a film adaptation of Anna Karenina, the threat of planes to ships and talk of girdles, which Thankful hates violently. When I did some research after finishing the book, I learned it was runner-up for a Newberry medal, and I’m really not surprised, it is that good. Robinson absolutely gets under Thankful’s skin, and makes us feel her growing pains. They are perhaps exacerbated by being a far from wealthy islander given the chance to go to a boarding school, a co-educational boarding school, no less, where she’s tested, the experience of a different life giving her perspective on her home. She also leaves her mark on the school.
Like Arthur Ransome, Robinson has a way of using sailing metaphors to express what is going on with her heroine, but this is aimed at an older readership, and for all that it was first published in the 1930s (which means the second world war lies ahead for the characters), it genuinely is a ‘young adult’ book, which always struck me as an American construct. Thankful learns ‘what a girl is for’ in her father’s words, which are gnomic to her at the start of the book. So, there is a crush, disappointment, an offhand proposal and what strikes one now as completely inappropriate attention from a Latin school master.
I’ve changed my mind about a sudden and dramatic event that happens towards the end of the book. On first reading it, I thought it was a bit of a deus ex machina, but learning more about the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, which Robinson (born in 1874) would have lived through, I found the unexpected, sudden serious sickness more credible. Through it, Thankful learns that she doesn’t just take after her grandfather.
However, there are a few editing errors in my copy, worst of all in the final sentence. (And now, let’s hope I caught all of my typos in this review.) But this is easily the best children/young adult book I’ve read this year; while reading it, I was certainly transported from my home to Maine.
[Edited 25/3/23 for a typo.]