"Beyond the Bright Sea" : A review by Michele Hathaway

"My name is Crow.

When I was a baby, 

someone tucked me into an old boat

 and pushed me out to sea." --Lauren Wolk

The opening lines of Lauren Wolk's 2017 Scott O'Dell Award winner, Beyond the Bright Sea, offer promise and mystery that do not disappoint. Crow's assertion of her name pitches the entire story, forming a perfect bookend. First sentences don't get much better than this.

"I washed up on a tiny island

like a seed riding the tide."

Chapter by chapter questions wash up on the sands of our imagination:

• What kind of name is "Crow"? Who is she?
• Who would put a baby in a leaky, old boat and push it out to sea?
• And Why?

Wikipedia Cuttyhunk Islands
(original Source: Bosley Wilder, Travel Editor,
The Block Island Times)

Crow's persistent quest to answer these questions lead her to the site of a former leper colony, into the path of a ruthless criminal, to buried pirate treasure, and to the brink of losing everything.

"The Island where we found each other was small but strong, anchored by a great pile of black rock that sheltered our cottage--a ramshackle place built from bits of lost ships--nestled on a bed of earth and sea muck, alongside a small garden and the skiff that took us wherever our feet could not."


Although set in 1925, Beyond the Bright Sea has a timeless quality.  Crow's quest and circumstance could be any when. The spare artifacts of life dovetail with the setting. Place, perhaps the most magical element of story, lends its power for symbol and emotional connection. Wolk's masterful use of place is lovely. She herself identifies the tiny island, part of the Elizabeth Islands of Massachusetts, as a character in her story.

This sense of place permeates the narrative to its deepest levels. Crow is doubly isolated, connected by a tenuous strip of sand at low tide to the larger island of Cuttyhunk, which in turn is separated from the mainland. More than this, she is socially isolated. Suspected of coming from the now abandoned leper colony on Penikese Island, Crow is treated as a pariah in her community. No one touches her or anything she has touched--ever--except Osh, her rescuer and guardian, and Miss Maggie, her only friend.

Breaking Nets

I think, like Crow, people can be complicit in the forces that shape them. Crow accepted the shunning of her island neighbors, but when she learned the truth about herself, she found the courage to test that shunning. She began to break the net enclosing her.

Beyond the Bright Sea offers children and adults a beautiful story where they can safely test the nets that bind them from discovering who they truly have always been and perhaps find what they never lost.

A Few More thoughts:

Diversity: We know that Crow's skin is darker than Osh's, but we never learn her ethnicity. This opens the door for a diverse audience to see themselves in Crow.

Loose threads?  We never learn Osh's given name or why he actively avoids recognition and his past. Miss Maggie is a mystery as well: How did she come to live on Cuttyhunk? Why is she alone? We don't need to know these things for the story to work. Rather, it is essential that we don't know because they steer us to the point of the story. For Osh, and eventually for Crow, what matters is not who or what they were but who they are now, in this time. And so it is for all of us. 

Thoughts for Parents, Teachers, and Librarians: 

Beyond the Bright Sea is a wonderful opportunity for cross-curriculum studies: Science--disease, marine biology, islands; Geography; Sociology--the nature of prejudice, the isolation of people with diseases; History--leprosy, immigration, orphanages; English--vocabulary, analogy, lyrical writing.



Michele Hathaway is an author and freelance editor. She has an M. A. in Social Anthropology and has worked in libraries in California, New Mexico, and Pennsylvania. She writes middle-grade nonfiction and stories set in culturally diverse, historical periods.

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Taking the Present Out of the Past

By Suzanne Morgan Williams

This spring, thanks to a grant from Nevada Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts, I had the opportunity to interview a number of historians and cultural experts for my work-in-progress. It’s historical novel set in the 1600s in Massachusetts. Creating that world, where people’s knowledge and belief systems are so different from our own, feels a bit like writing fantasy or sci-fi. I’m building a lot of the world from the ground up. Yes, I can identify the trees, animals, and the weather. I’m pretty sure anger was still ugly and that people wanted to be loved. But how did they feel about themselves? Did they expect the same things we do? I’m convinced their views on heaven, hell, and this earth in between were very, very different.

I asked one historian what pitfalls I might face in developing my teen girl protagonist. He almost slapped his palm to his face and said, “Just don’t make her a spunky red-headed girl.” Then he talked to me about “presentism.” His premise was that people in the past, and particularly in the early colonial era, really didn’t want the same things that we do; that their main concerns were far removed from ours. (Although I’ll postulate that their emotional reactions were undoubtedly similar.) I’ve had a similar discussion with a writer friend who is active in educating other writers and illustrators about different perspectives in our diverse world. As a Muslim woman, she objects to Muslim girl characters being given motives by non-Muslim writers that she believes are not true to their cultural and religious background. We have to be careful – not everyone is just like us.

Of course, when an author creates a fictional character, we are in charge of their wants and fears, their motives and reactions. But for me, in writing a historical novel that children will use to augment their take on history, I need to keep the milieu of that time and place authentic. I don’t know if I’ve ever been quite as challenged by that as I am now. I’m trying to create characters living 450 years ago – before we knew about infectious diseases, electricity, or believed in equal rights. It was the time when religion was so closely tied to politics and class that dividing the three, in our modern way, is almost impossible and not very useful. The afterlife was not just a promise but also a threat. Writings from that era seem distressingly black and white. But I’m sure life itself was as messy and nuanced as it is today. How to capture that?

The easy part of excising “presentism” from my writing, is finding metaphors that can’t work – “An electric current ran up my arm,” for example. Electricity had yet to be “discovered.” The harder part is making the characters relatable to today’s readers while staying true to the history and without making them seem stilted or ignorant. They were people of their times as are we. If I can get that message across, that they had their own struggles and found ways to deal with them, then I’ve succeeded. Wish me luck.