The Longest Journey

April 15, 2010
In a gross miscarriage of justice, Scottish blacksmith Ewan Macgregor and his 14-year-old son, Davey, are sentenced to exile on a trumped-up charge of poaching, despite the lairds request for clemency. Determined to be reunited with her husband, Mary-Ann sells the smithy and sails with her three youngest children to Sydney, unwillingly leaving second son Matthew in Scotland when he flees the clipper just before the tide turns. But Davey was imprisoned on the Isle of Wight, and Ewan was sent to Van Diemens Land (Tasmania) rather than New South Wales as originally informed. So Mary-Ann searches fruitlessly, while Daveys natural father, now an influential MP, tries to reclaim her, and other men also find her attractive. McInnes sets her far-ranging historical drama against the small-town backdrop of 1848 Scotland and the raw, unsettled expanse of convict-colonized Australia, using class distinctions, the inequitable legal system, and Britains greed for cheap, expendable labor to expertly paint a vivid, dramatic world.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)