I feel like this is something I need to establish early on.

So what happens when someone doesn’t want to feel helpless anymore? What happens when she dares the sky to fall? What happens on Orphan Island when someone doesn’t play by the rules? Jinny, and everyone else along with her, is about to find out. And when a year has passed and that boat comes bearing a new child with eyes as blue as Jinny’s, she’s faced with the inevitable, right? The boat comes. Jinny raises Ess in his wake, teaching her swim and eat and read, though not very well (helpless). After all, it’s like the old rhyme says: “Nine on an island, orphans all, / Any more, the sky might fall.” But Jinny doesn’t hold with the old rhyme, she just wants Deen to stay.

It’s Jinny’s turn to take care of a child and Deen’s to leave the island for good. On the boat coming to her small island is a girl named Ess, not much older than four or five. When Jinny hears the bell, and sees her friend Deen, and sees the approaching green boat, that’s how she feels. And clearly this review is fated to follow suit. What’s the true story here? What is this book and who is its audience? Orphan Island is a book that leaves you with more questions than answers. It’s for adults that don’t think they think like kids at all. It’s for adults who think they think like kids. Orphan Island is a metaphor, an allegory, a work of magical realism, a fantasy, a post-apocalyptic work of quiet science fiction. A book like Orphan Island by Laurel Snyder is almost perfectly designed to throw my assumptions (my sweet, precious assumptions) into a tizzy as I try to process the material and then, most difficult of all, turn my thoughts into a coherent review. They only really surface when I encounter children’s books that squiggle into the deepest crevices of that organ between my ears. Are you the same person that you were as a kid? If you’ve changed then does that make you someone new? Because my job consists of reading books for children, I like to pretend that I’ve a more finely honed and developed sense of what kids like than people that don’t have my job, but isn’t that a flawed concept right there? If I’m not the same person I was as a child, why should I have any reason to think that I’ve a better read on their preferences than anyone else? I don’t always have these thoughts. I spend more time than I’d like thinking about what makes a person and how that person is an entirely new creation at different stages of life.

*spoiler alert on the whole darn review, basically* Walden Pond Press (an imprint of Harper Collins)

Laurel snyder orphan island