"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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A Historical Novel in a Month? by Louise Spiegler

Every November at least a few of my college students will ask me if I want to participate in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). 

My response is usually incredulous laughter (the expression of the woman in the mosaic to the right is incredulous enough to express my feelings). November is a month when I am typically teaching three to four college classes with about 120 students and, no, I don’t have a teaching assistant to correct papers for me. Even finding time to write a blog post is a challenge!

However, I usually turn around and encourage those students to take part in the novel-writing challenge themselves.

And, mostly, they respond with incredulous laughter.

As well they might, since they often also work substantial jobs as well as being college students. Some of them work, are college students and parents. 

However, summer is my writing time, so this summer, I decided to take up the challenge and  try writing a first draft novel in month. A historical fiction piece, mind you, set in Ancient Rome.

Writing a first draft is usually is a slow and laborious process for me. In fact, I’d say it’s like clearing a garden of enormous rocks, pulling them out of the ground one by one. Does that sound dire? It’s not supposed to. But there’s a feeling of excavation, of unearthing or uncovering a story. And also a strong feeling of hard lifting. 

And a historical novel is, as many on this blog have pointed out, a massive undertaking of research and fact-checking.

So writing a historical novel in a month seemed crazy.

And yet, I’ve just finished my first extremely messy draft! (Feel free to cheer.)

I feel somewhat shocked, and, as usual when I finish a draft, I have no idea whether the goose has laid a golden egg or whether it has laid… what geese normally lay. No one has even read more than three chapters of it, so I have no sounding board. And that’s unusual for me as well, but I think that’s necessary if you want to write an initial draft so quickly.

The title, at the moment is Anaktoria Across the Waves. If you are an ancient history geek, you’ll recognize that as the title of a poem by the wonderful Greek poet, Sappho, a woman poet, actually, and even more interestingly, a lesbian poet. 

The image to the left is meant to be a portrait of Sappho, but read a little of her poetry and it will be hard to believe she would ever look this stern. (see below for a fragment of her work).

 So here’s how I did it.

I had a strong idea: a girl in ancient Rome, who is the daughter of a surgeon, and who is getting trained to follow in her father’s footsteps, as a doctor. (As I've mentioned elsewhere, this was a possibility for some women in the empire.) But her father disappears and her uncle takes over the surgery. And he is not a fan of having his niece become his apprentice --not least because he has a son of his own to whom he wants to hand down the position. The main thread of the story concerns Anaktoria’s freedoms getting taken away one by one, and how she turns the tables to eventually win back her rights.

For me, this reflects a dual social reality in ancient Rome: women, as in other ancient societies, were restricted in many ways, and to read men's writings about women is to be plunged into a sea of misogyny. And yet, if you dig (and I recommend Bonnie Anderson and Judith Zinsser’s book, A History of their Own, as a good introduction to the complexities of women’s history) there were certain freedoms that women had. For example, they had the right to divorce their husbands, to keep their own dowries and sometimes, to control their own finances. And  that gave them wiggle room.

And professional women, though a small minority, certainly existed, not least in the medical field. There are actually tombstones and memorial plaques commemorating women doctors.

So, what about the research? What about the painstaking hours of research? How can that meld with writing a very fast first draft?

Here’s the thing: You can only write a historical novel in a month if your research is already pretty much solid.

I’ve taught ancient history with an emphasis on Rome for more than ten years. So the era is very familiar to me, even the small details of everyday life. And now that I have a draft, I know which very specific details I still need to look up to make sure I’m accurate and to add depth and flavor. 

Another thing that helped was that I have already completed another novel, entitled The Healer’s Yew which involves Anaktoria as a secondary character. (My heroic agent is currently trying to place it).

Healer stars Anaktoria's best friend, Gaius Petronius Felix, the baker’s son who dreams of being an artist, and Titus, an escaped slave who knows the emperor’s murderous secret, and therefore is being stalked by the emperor’s spies.

So I have a very specific period which I have already extensively researched for another novel.

However, my new novel has a different focus, so I did more research on women’s lives in ancient Rome during the empire. This, again, is fairly familiar territory for me.

What is new and I continue to read up on is Roman medical knowledge and practice. Very surprising stuff! I can now tell you something about antiseptics, something about humoral theory, something about surgery, and perhaps more than I’d like about ancient gynecology. 

So now that I’ve got the story sketched out, I’ll be launching back into deeper research.

Now, if only I could get to visit Rome! If anyone hears of a fairy godmother who grants time and cash-strapped writers tickets around the world, let me know.

I don't know if I will ever try to write a novel in a month again, but I certainly am happy to have a draft to work from, as I get ready to plunge back into another busy school year.

POSTSCRIPT:

Here's a taste of Sappho's poetry:

The moon is down
And the Pleiades
And yet
Alone I lie.

Sara K Joiner: Medical Historical Fiction

Historical nursing display at a Houston hospital.

Last month my mother underwent shoulder surgery. While the procedure went well, there were some slight complications afterward that were blown out of proportion. As I sat in hospital rooms and listened to a parade of medical professionals ask the same questions over and over, I wondered about the distinctions between her care in the 21st century and the care she would have received 50, 100 or even 200 years ago for the same injury.

The emergency room visit was certainly enlightening. After X-rays and CT scans, we were told her upper humerus was fractured. Although no one told us her shoulder was dislocated, it apparently was. Many shots and sedatives later, the ER doctor worked to set her arm. Except for the drugs, this procedure has probably changed little over the years—pull and push the arm back in place. The doctor even had to climb up in bed and use her foot to help set Mom's arm. I have no doubt that would have been unbearable for anyone without drugs.

But what has changed in medicine?

Some progress has been and is still being made in eradicating disease. In the novel In the Shadow of Blackbirds by Cat Winters, readers learn about various and sundry treatments for the Spanish Flu. The main character is living in San Diego in 1918. The city is in crisis because seemingly everyone either has the flu, had the flu or will get the flu. People are dying in the street. Desperation (and a lack of medical knowledge) leads people to try anything—including eating onions multiple times daily or even trying sugar cubes soaked in kerosene.

With the ease with which diseases travel now, the mere thought of coming in contact with someone who has a highly contagious illness can be terrifying. The recent Ebola scare in Texas and New York demonstrated that. The same panics have happened throughout time. Laurie Halse Anderson's novel Fever 1793 shows how Philadelphia panicked to such a degree that Congress fled the city rather than fall victim to the epidemic.

Throughout history, there have been countless individuals who have risked their lives to relieve the suffering of the dying, treat the symptoms of the sick or discover the causes of contagion. Doctors, nurses, scientists and ordinary people have done all these things. The novel Deadly by Julie Chibbaro creates a mystery surrounding the causes of typhus in several New York homes and the search for the woman called "Typhoid Mary."

These are just some of the books featuring medical history. You can find more at your school or public library.

Sara K Joiner is the author of the upcoming novel After the Ashes published by Holiday House. She is also the children's coordinator for the Brazoria County Library System.