Book Review: Morning Girl
Rated by 1 member
What Parents Should Know
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 Media Review
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."
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