THE PAGES OF THE SEA

A vivid portrait of a young girl growing up on a Caribbean island in the 1960s.

Wheeler’s mother has departed for England in search of a better life. Left in the care of their two aunts, Innez and Celeste, young Wheeler and her older sisters Adele and Hesta have stayed behind on the unnamed island. Also in the house are Innez’s sons: Donelle—Wheeler’s age, and her playmate—Jonathan, and Floyd, the eldest, whose wicked temper and mean spirit terrorize the whole family. Wheeler desperately misses her mother and waits impatiently for her to send for the three of them to join her. Often alone, she feels uncared for by her bossy older sisters and her fierce, mysterious aunts: “She in hav no farda, she in hav no mudda. She in hav nobody…dey mudda in sending f’dem.” Even Donelle disappoints her—his loyalty is fickle. Wheeler struggles to understand the world, her island, and her family without her mother: “Having not troubled her before, time these days seemed all the while to be shoving Wheeler around.” She strives to uncover the secrets behind her family’s dysfunction, attempting to grasp the “darkness [she and Donelle] sensed in big people’s lives.” Hawk’s novel grapples with the simultaneous, oft-overlooked wonder and terror of being a young person experiencing things for the first time. Wheeler confronts the full gamut of emotions with a charming stubbornness. Hawk’s prose is beautiful, a lyrical and loving portrayal of an island and its people; much of the dialogue is written in dialect, which can be both challenging and rewarding.

A unique, scrappy, tender bildungsroman.