TIMOTHY OF THE CAY

The Cay (the award-winning 1969 novel about racial prejudice in the 1940s) is the unseen vessel in the middle of a ``prequel/sequel'' in which Taylor explores both the black man Timothy's life as it leads up to the wreck of the Hato in the Caribbean during WW II and 12-year-old Phillip Enright's journey back to civilization after his rescue from the island. Alternating chapters follow Timothy from his early abandonment by his mother through his struggles to sail the sea and his command of his own ship; and Phillip's agony as he returns to the busy streets and busy lives of his parents, through an operation to regain his sight, and finally to a return with his father to Timothy's cay. Laced with a lilting island cadence, Timothy's chapters sketch a murky sea of racial prejudice; readers will ache with him at his losses. Phillip's chapters, in a terse first person, depict the narrowness of his mother's world with a clarity heightened by Phillip's blindness. A journey well worth taking. (Fiction. 10-14)