Common Sense Note
Simple story, beautifully told, appeals to kids who like thoughtful character-based stories. This lyrical look at pre-Columbian Taino culture stresses the bonds of family, and behavioral changes involved in growing up, and raises the issue of culture differences in a powerful way.
Common Sense Review
Reviewed By: Matt Berman
This beautiful and powerful short novel makes a distant culture familiar and its loss quietly devastating. This is a simple story, lyrically told, with a knockout punch at the end that will leave you gasping. Reminiscent of some of Patricia MacLachlan's novels, such as The Facts and Fictions of Minna Pratt, in tone, it is the story of a Taino family living on an island in the Bahamas in the late fifteenth century. It is told in alternating chapters by Morning Girl and her brother, Star Boy.
Despite their distance from us in time and space, their life is not alien at all. It is filled with the small crises and epiphanies that are part of any family: sibling rivalry, a miscarriage, a storm. Despite her frequent annoyance with her younger brother, Morning Girl stands by him when he is ridiculed by others, and some of the most touching scenes are between these often antagonistic siblings.
And so, by the time the last chapter arrives, in which a large square canoe with strangely dressed people arrives, we have come to know these people well, to feel for them affection and understanding. But Columbus's journal entry, with its casual and well-meaning racism, brings a jolting perceptual shift, as we see these lovely people suddenly through the eyes of the West, which we know is about to destroy them. Like the rest of the book, the ending is quiet and understated, and all the more devastating in its impact. This is a profoundly beautiful book, elegant and spare, that does more than any facts or diatribes could to make us see things from a different perspective.
From the Book:
I swallowed the last of the food in my mouth and lifted my eyes. Star Boy had not moved.
"It's all right," I whispered to him. "Go."
And he did, finally, but not before he spoke so that only I could hear, not before he had called me the name he would always afterward use when we were alone together, not before he had said, so softly, "The One Who Stands Beside."
Plot Summary:
Morning Girl and her brother, Star Boy, may not get along too well. But when it counts, they stand by each other. Their near-perfect life on a Caribbean island in the 1400s though, is about to change forever. In alternating chapters, siblings Morning Girl and Star Boy take turns telling about their life and family living on a Bahamian island. Children of opposite tastes and temperaments, each can't understand -- and often resents -- the other.
But the ties of blood are strong. Through the crises of life, both large and small, the siblings rely on each other. One passage describes how, "across the space between us, we made a fishing line with our eyes and each pulled the other to the center." Star Boy accidentally sets his father's canoe adrift, and is so ashamed that he tries to turn himself into a rock. Their mother has a miscarriage. The island survives a hurricane, and when the people gather to celebrate, Star Boy is humiliated and Morning Girl defends him.
At the very end, Morning Girl meets a group of strangers. Columbus's journal entry describing that meeting is quoted in an epilogue.
Related Books:
Other Books by Michael Dorris
Guests
Sees Behind Trees
The Window
Related Books
The Barn by Avi
The Facts and Fictions of Minna Pratt by Patricia MacLachlan
Sarah, Plain and Tall by Patricia MacLachlan
Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate Dicamillo
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Sexual ContentIt's mentioned at the end that the people don't wear clothes. |
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Social BehaviorThe siblings are sometimes unkind to each other. The journal entry at the end, speaking of the Taino as fit only for servitude, is shocking, as the author intended. |
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