Island Bound

October 1, 1997
Gr 5-7-Chris is determined to prove to his friends that he can survive alone for a week on tiny, unsettled Fowlers Island off the coast of Maine, which is rumored to be haunted and was the scene of a tragedy 150 years ago. There he meets Joellen, who is accompanying her father and his young girlfriend on a research project to restore the area's puffin population. Joellen spends much of her time writing a story about a girl who was abandoned on an island. After some initial reluctance and verbal sparring, the two young people jointly explore their surroundings, including threateningly named Dread Mans Cove. They uncover an old oilcloth-wrapped bundle underneath an uprooted tree that contains a journal. Entries in it eerily parallel the story Joellen has been crafting and reveal the truth about the island's ghostly past: the girl who supposedly haunts it is Chris's great-great-grandmother, who had been left there during a doomed attempt to enter the United States illegally during the Irish Potato famine. Readers will need patience to get through the novel's lengthy setup and its numerous subplots-seabird behavior, local environment, sheep farming, Joellen's writing process, her discomfort with her parents' separation, and her father's romance with his former assistant. Some plot elements remain unresolved at the conclusion of this part mystery/part adventure novel, ultimately leaving readers unsatisfied.-Ellen Fader, Multnomah County Library, Portland, OR

July 1, 1997
Gr. 5^-7. Spooky family stories, ominous place names, and coincidences (or are they?) add a whiff of the supernatural to this story about two teenagers uncovering the truth about a 150-year-old tragedy on a tiny Maine island. Chris has been on Fowlers Island before, but now he's there alone, having recklessly boasted that he could spend an entire week living off the land. Joellen's father is working to restore the island's puffin population, but because she can't stand to be with him and his new companion, Abby, she holes up in an old lighthouse to fume--and to work on a short story about an abandoned girl and a buried treasure. Drawn together almost against their wills, Chris and Joellen put up surly fronts but find themselves opening up to one another. The plot thickens when they find an old oilcloth bundle beneath an uprooted tree and learn from the journal within that a family fleeing the Irish potato famine had been forced to leave young Flora behind during a fatal attempt to enter the U.S. illegally. Eerily, Joellen's story closely matches the journal's. Levin writes authoritatively about sheep, puffins, and the writing process itself (Joellen's plotting is described in detail) as she expertly develops characters, pushes them past brushes with danger, and doles out pieces of a puzzle, assembled at the end when Joellen discovers that Flora was Chris' great-great-grandmother. Put readers intrigued by this engrossing reconstruction of a painful episode in a family's past onto Gary Schmidt's "The Sin Eater" (1996), an even richer exploration of the theme. ((Reviewed July 1997))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1997, American Library Association.)