rachelmanija (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rachelmanija) wrote2023-12-28 12:16 pm
rachelmanija) wrote2023-12-28 12:16 pm
Orphan Island, by Laurel Snyder
I bought this book in the library book sale, based on a logline about orphans surviving on an mysterious island. Little did I know what I was in for.
I HATED this book. It's not a realistic or even unrealistic survival story, it's a preachy allegory that doesn't even make sense on its own terms AND has unnecessary plotlines that seem set up only to frustrate the reader by going nowhere AND has a bad message AND appears to advocate letting toddlers use filleting knives.
There are nine children on the island. There are always nine children on the island. Every year, an otherwise empty boat arrives with a toddler. The toddler gets off the boat. The oldest child on the island gets in the boat, and the boat takes off by itself. That child is never seen again. And so the cycle continues.
The kids have no idea why this is happening, but regard it as a normal fact of life and have been told that if a child ever refuses to get on the boat, the sky will fall. Who told them this? Older kids. Who told those kids? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The book opens with the arrival of a new toddler, Ess, who speaks in obnoxious phonetic baby talk, "Whah dis?" and "Ess sooze" (shoes). I HATE baby talk.
Deen, the oldest child, gets in the boat over the tearful protests of the next-oldest child, Jinny. Now Jinny has lost her best friend and is stuck as the primary caretaker for Ess. Lucky for Ess, the island is a paradise. Food is extremely easy to get, there are bees but they don't sting, there are snakes but they don't bite, the sunrises depict beautiful flowers opening and stuff like that, and if you jump off the cliffs a gentle wind will blow you back. None of the kids ever get sick or hurt, except for very minor scrapes.
So clearly, we're dealing with either Heaven or a constructed environment. At first, all signs point to "constructed environment." There's a library of real books from our world, and Jinny marvels over such strange things as "movies" and "candy."
None of the kids have any idea what's off the island or if the books are describing real things, because they all arrived when they were so young that they couldn't explain anything, and by the time they're old enough to talk coherently, they don't remember anything before their arrival.
The books all have a girl's name in them, and Jinny eventually finds a letter from that girl, who's clearly from our world and was sent to the island for unknown reasons when she was significantly older than the toddlers who are coming now. She remembers her parents and mentions being glad the island was cleared of wolves, but is worried because it's been years and she's not sure why she's still there. Intriguing!
This is why I kept reading - I was curious WTF was going on with the island and why. Virtual reality? A carefully maintained super-playground? A long-term science experiment? A generation ship? This is all a dream while Jinny's in a coma in the real world?
The kids have very limited knowledge about the world, as they all arrived as toddlers and were taught by preteen kids who were also taught by preteen kids. So a lot of the names for things are ones they made up, because they don't know what the real names are. (This is why their names are all spelled oddly.) Sometimes I liked this, like "jellyblobs" for sea anemones. Other times I did not like it, like "wishing" for peeing/pooping, and the toilet being a "wish cabin" BARF FOREVER into the wish basin.
This also fails to have a point. In books like Piranesi or The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents, we see how specific people construct knowledge in different ways depending on who they are and what they have to draw from. In Orphan Island, it's all just cute or twee and not drawn from anything specific beyond not knowing how to spell.
But all is not well in cutesy paradise. Jinny is resentful over being stuck with Ess, worried that Ess will get hurt, and doesn't want to get in a boat and sail off to somewhere totally unknown and possibly to her death. None of the other children think those are reasonable concerns for Jinny to have, and everything in the narrative supports the other kids.
When Jinny tries to teach Ess the things the older kids are supposed to teach their toddler charges, Ess doesn't seem to learn them very well, Jinny gets impatient, and the other kids lecture Jinny on how it's very important that Ess learn and Jinny needs to teach her better. (Note that Jinny is the oldest kid, and she's like eleven. In fact, she comes across as the youngest short of Ess, because everyone else is smarter and more competent and calmer than her.)
I hesitate to say that I have a literal trigger for anything in literature, but if I do, it's when a character is criticized or punished or mocked for being unable to do something when they've never been taught how to do it and there's no reason why they should know how to do it, and the narrative seems to think this is fine. (I don't mind if the narrative clearly thinks this is unfair.) How is Jinny supposed to teach Ess how to read? She clearly has no idea. The other kids, disgusted with her inability to do so, take over and successfully teach Ess to read, but we don't know how they do it because it happens off page.
Similarly, Jinny fails at teaching Ess how to swim, largely because she's worried that toddler Ess could drown. The other kids tell her that's impossible, and one of them tosses Ess in the ocean. This successfully teaches her how to swim!
Jinny is worried that if she tries to teach Ess to scale and gut a fish with a sharp filleting knife, she might cut herself. Remember, Ess is a LITERAL TODDLER who talks like "Dinny, pease stay?" The other kids tell Jinny she's being overprotective and to let Ess use the knife. Of course, Ess is fine.
The lessons are so bad here that I started to feel like I was being gaslit by a book. Okay, sure, in this specific situation the kids are clearly being protected by something and it does seem impossible for them to get hurt, not to mention that toddlers are somehow magically capable of the physical coordination to SCALE AND GUT A FISH, so Jinny actually is being overprotective, buuuuut...
If this was black comedy, I would probably like it. But it's not, and Jinny is presented as being clearly in the wrong. That's not to say that I like Jinny. I actually couldn't stand her. I just hated the other kids even more. Needless to say, none of the characters came across as actual kids.
Oh and also Jinny is explicitly being condescended to and lied to by the other kids - at one point they explain to her that her lost bestie Deen, who she'd thought was an advocate of letting her do things her own way, had secretly told them that the key to smooth relations with Jinny was to let her THINK she was getting her own way, but actually to manipulate her so she only thought that was true UGH UGH UGH.
ANYWAY. So what's up with these boats? Let's leave aside the possible science fiction explanations and look at it as allegory. The children arrive when they're very young and know and remember nothing. They're cared for by others. When they're older but just before they hit puberty, they get in them again and sail away. The allegory seems like the arrival is birth, and the departure is leaving the golden, protected, beautiful land of childhood behind and entering into the uncharted and scary waters of adolescence.
But that is not a good allegory for adolescence. (Even apart from very few people thinking of their childhoods as perfection even if they were happy!) The children have no idea where they're going or whether they'll ever see any of their friends again or even if they'll survive. Adolescence is kind of an unknown, but not to that extent. You're still allowed to see your younger friends! The departure feels much more like an allegory for death.
So is Jinny's desire to not get on the boat an allegory for a child afraid of becoming a teenager? Or is it an allegory for a person refusing to face death? This is a children's book, mind, so if it's the latter that's a little disturbing.
Orphan Island feels like a preachy, message-y book. But what's the message? Well...
A boat comes for Jinny and delivers another toddler, Loo. But Jinny refuses to leave in the boat! Oh no!
The other kids are deeply upset. This is bad and wrong! She's being selfish! The sky will fall!
Jinny points out that this makes no sense and the sky cannot fall. She also points out that none of them have any idea what happens when you get on the boat, and for all they know, everyone who does is eaten by sea monsters.
And then. The bees that never stung before start stinging the kids. The snakes that never bit before start biting. The winds no longer blow kids back from the cliffs. Loo gets creepy and tortures starfish. A poisonous snake bites Loo. Jinny gets her period and thinks she broke the island and is punished by being broken herself - I guess the library didn't include any Judy Blume.
Finally, the sky does fall! Sort of. It starts snowing, which has never happened on the island before. Jinny has cursed everyone and ruined everything by refusing to go to her possible death! She takes the dying Loo with her on the boat and leaves, hoping someone out there might be able to cure him.
The end!
There is no sequel. This is it.
If this is a moral story – and it is clearly intended as a moral story, it's incredibly preachy – the moral is that you should not think for yourself and you should obey received wisdom, even if it seems nonsensical and will possibly kill you.
Or is it all an allegory for the Garden of Eden? This fits better than anything else. The island is a paradise with snakes in it. Jinny breaks the rules and destroys the paradise and is expelled from it. The lesson is to obey God's orders even if they seem arbitrary or suicidal, with a patina of science fiction that goes nowhere.
Buuut, Snyder is a Jewish writer who has written Jewish children's books. Of course, the Garden of Eden is also a Jewish story, but in my experience it's not one which Jews typically give a lot of attention to.
I looked up some interviews, and the author says the book is an allegory for growing up and learning which rules are important.
I still don't think the allegory works for growing up, and the only way Jinny can know that it really is important for her to leave is to ignore both common sense and logic (the sky can't fall; no one has ever come back or even sent a message back, which doesn't bode well; there's no reason given for why you have to leave other than "because") and trust solely in tradition. Obey arbitrary rules without question or the sky will LITERALLY fall, kids!
In conclusion, fuck the baby talk, fuck the misspelled names, and fuck wishes that come out of your ass.
My favorite review from Goodreads: "We listened to this on audiobook, and upon completion my children wanted to stop the vehicle and put the discs under the car and run them over. [...]
We ranted for at least a half an hour. We woke up the next morning and one of my son's first words were, "I'm still angry about the book."
I HATED this book. It's not a realistic or even unrealistic survival story, it's a preachy allegory that doesn't even make sense on its own terms AND has unnecessary plotlines that seem set up only to frustrate the reader by going nowhere AND has a bad message AND appears to advocate letting toddlers use filleting knives.
There are nine children on the island. There are always nine children on the island. Every year, an otherwise empty boat arrives with a toddler. The toddler gets off the boat. The oldest child on the island gets in the boat, and the boat takes off by itself. That child is never seen again. And so the cycle continues.
The kids have no idea why this is happening, but regard it as a normal fact of life and have been told that if a child ever refuses to get on the boat, the sky will fall. Who told them this? Older kids. Who told those kids? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The book opens with the arrival of a new toddler, Ess, who speaks in obnoxious phonetic baby talk, "Whah dis?" and "Ess sooze" (shoes). I HATE baby talk.
Deen, the oldest child, gets in the boat over the tearful protests of the next-oldest child, Jinny. Now Jinny has lost her best friend and is stuck as the primary caretaker for Ess. Lucky for Ess, the island is a paradise. Food is extremely easy to get, there are bees but they don't sting, there are snakes but they don't bite, the sunrises depict beautiful flowers opening and stuff like that, and if you jump off the cliffs a gentle wind will blow you back. None of the kids ever get sick or hurt, except for very minor scrapes.
So clearly, we're dealing with either Heaven or a constructed environment. At first, all signs point to "constructed environment." There's a library of real books from our world, and Jinny marvels over such strange things as "movies" and "candy."
None of the kids have any idea what's off the island or if the books are describing real things, because they all arrived when they were so young that they couldn't explain anything, and by the time they're old enough to talk coherently, they don't remember anything before their arrival.
The books all have a girl's name in them, and Jinny eventually finds a letter from that girl, who's clearly from our world and was sent to the island for unknown reasons when she was significantly older than the toddlers who are coming now. She remembers her parents and mentions being glad the island was cleared of wolves, but is worried because it's been years and she's not sure why she's still there. Intriguing!
This is why I kept reading - I was curious WTF was going on with the island and why. Virtual reality? A carefully maintained super-playground? A long-term science experiment? A generation ship? This is all a dream while Jinny's in a coma in the real world?
The kids have very limited knowledge about the world, as they all arrived as toddlers and were taught by preteen kids who were also taught by preteen kids. So a lot of the names for things are ones they made up, because they don't know what the real names are. (This is why their names are all spelled oddly.) Sometimes I liked this, like "jellyblobs" for sea anemones. Other times I did not like it, like "wishing" for peeing/pooping, and the toilet being a "wish cabin" BARF FOREVER into the wish basin.
This also fails to have a point. In books like Piranesi or The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents, we see how specific people construct knowledge in different ways depending on who they are and what they have to draw from. In Orphan Island, it's all just cute or twee and not drawn from anything specific beyond not knowing how to spell.
But all is not well in cutesy paradise. Jinny is resentful over being stuck with Ess, worried that Ess will get hurt, and doesn't want to get in a boat and sail off to somewhere totally unknown and possibly to her death. None of the other children think those are reasonable concerns for Jinny to have, and everything in the narrative supports the other kids.
When Jinny tries to teach Ess the things the older kids are supposed to teach their toddler charges, Ess doesn't seem to learn them very well, Jinny gets impatient, and the other kids lecture Jinny on how it's very important that Ess learn and Jinny needs to teach her better. (Note that Jinny is the oldest kid, and she's like eleven. In fact, she comes across as the youngest short of Ess, because everyone else is smarter and more competent and calmer than her.)
I hesitate to say that I have a literal trigger for anything in literature, but if I do, it's when a character is criticized or punished or mocked for being unable to do something when they've never been taught how to do it and there's no reason why they should know how to do it, and the narrative seems to think this is fine. (I don't mind if the narrative clearly thinks this is unfair.) How is Jinny supposed to teach Ess how to read? She clearly has no idea. The other kids, disgusted with her inability to do so, take over and successfully teach Ess to read, but we don't know how they do it because it happens off page.
Similarly, Jinny fails at teaching Ess how to swim, largely because she's worried that toddler Ess could drown. The other kids tell her that's impossible, and one of them tosses Ess in the ocean. This successfully teaches her how to swim!
Jinny is worried that if she tries to teach Ess to scale and gut a fish with a sharp filleting knife, she might cut herself. Remember, Ess is a LITERAL TODDLER who talks like "Dinny, pease stay?" The other kids tell Jinny she's being overprotective and to let Ess use the knife. Of course, Ess is fine.
The lessons are so bad here that I started to feel like I was being gaslit by a book. Okay, sure, in this specific situation the kids are clearly being protected by something and it does seem impossible for them to get hurt, not to mention that toddlers are somehow magically capable of the physical coordination to SCALE AND GUT A FISH, so Jinny actually is being overprotective, buuuuut...
If this was black comedy, I would probably like it. But it's not, and Jinny is presented as being clearly in the wrong. That's not to say that I like Jinny. I actually couldn't stand her. I just hated the other kids even more. Needless to say, none of the characters came across as actual kids.
Oh and also Jinny is explicitly being condescended to and lied to by the other kids - at one point they explain to her that her lost bestie Deen, who she'd thought was an advocate of letting her do things her own way, had secretly told them that the key to smooth relations with Jinny was to let her THINK she was getting her own way, but actually to manipulate her so she only thought that was true UGH UGH UGH.
ANYWAY. So what's up with these boats? Let's leave aside the possible science fiction explanations and look at it as allegory. The children arrive when they're very young and know and remember nothing. They're cared for by others. When they're older but just before they hit puberty, they get in them again and sail away. The allegory seems like the arrival is birth, and the departure is leaving the golden, protected, beautiful land of childhood behind and entering into the uncharted and scary waters of adolescence.
But that is not a good allegory for adolescence. (Even apart from very few people thinking of their childhoods as perfection even if they were happy!) The children have no idea where they're going or whether they'll ever see any of their friends again or even if they'll survive. Adolescence is kind of an unknown, but not to that extent. You're still allowed to see your younger friends! The departure feels much more like an allegory for death.
So is Jinny's desire to not get on the boat an allegory for a child afraid of becoming a teenager? Or is it an allegory for a person refusing to face death? This is a children's book, mind, so if it's the latter that's a little disturbing.
Orphan Island feels like a preachy, message-y book. But what's the message? Well...
A boat comes for Jinny and delivers another toddler, Loo. But Jinny refuses to leave in the boat! Oh no!
The other kids are deeply upset. This is bad and wrong! She's being selfish! The sky will fall!
Jinny points out that this makes no sense and the sky cannot fall. She also points out that none of them have any idea what happens when you get on the boat, and for all they know, everyone who does is eaten by sea monsters.
And then. The bees that never stung before start stinging the kids. The snakes that never bit before start biting. The winds no longer blow kids back from the cliffs. Loo gets creepy and tortures starfish. A poisonous snake bites Loo. Jinny gets her period and thinks she broke the island and is punished by being broken herself - I guess the library didn't include any Judy Blume.
Finally, the sky does fall! Sort of. It starts snowing, which has never happened on the island before. Jinny has cursed everyone and ruined everything by refusing to go to her possible death! She takes the dying Loo with her on the boat and leaves, hoping someone out there might be able to cure him.
The end!
There is no sequel. This is it.
If this is a moral story – and it is clearly intended as a moral story, it's incredibly preachy – the moral is that you should not think for yourself and you should obey received wisdom, even if it seems nonsensical and will possibly kill you.
Or is it all an allegory for the Garden of Eden? This fits better than anything else. The island is a paradise with snakes in it. Jinny breaks the rules and destroys the paradise and is expelled from it. The lesson is to obey God's orders even if they seem arbitrary or suicidal, with a patina of science fiction that goes nowhere.
Buuut, Snyder is a Jewish writer who has written Jewish children's books. Of course, the Garden of Eden is also a Jewish story, but in my experience it's not one which Jews typically give a lot of attention to.
I looked up some interviews, and the author says the book is an allegory for growing up and learning which rules are important.
I still don't think the allegory works for growing up, and the only way Jinny can know that it really is important for her to leave is to ignore both common sense and logic (the sky can't fall; no one has ever come back or even sent a message back, which doesn't bode well; there's no reason given for why you have to leave other than "because") and trust solely in tradition. Obey arbitrary rules without question or the sky will LITERALLY fall, kids!
In conclusion, fuck the baby talk, fuck the misspelled names, and fuck wishes that come out of your ass.
My favorite review from Goodreads: "We listened to this on audiobook, and upon completion my children wanted to stop the vehicle and put the discs under the car and run them over. [...]
We ranted for at least a half an hour. We woke up the next morning and one of my son's first words were, "I'm still angry about the book."
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National Book Award long list!
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I don't think I agree with the author on the important rules.
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It doesn't even seem coherent by its own rules. Does the letter from the girl who remembers her family tie in to the ending of the destruction of the island at all?
[edit] It also feels like Peter Pan is in its DNA, but again not in a useful way.
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Yes! I also thought of Peter Pan. If you look at it that way, the answer to Peter Pan is that a girl who tries to be Peter Pan will ruin everything for everyone.
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Tying the disintegration of the island to the explicit onset of the protagonist's menses also doesn't seem to support the idea that the transition into adolescence is normal and inevitable as opposed to a punishment especially for female-bodied children.
[edit] I'm just really stuck on how punitive the entire book sounds. Like, I've met less heavy-handed fairy tales.
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Her punishment is to get her period with no idea what it is, find out that everyone was manipulating her all along, publicly fail as a mom-figure, be personally responsible for her beautiful home being destroyed, possibly cause another kid's death, and have to leave (possibly to die!) anyway.
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I can't even sarcastically type that that seems perfectly proportionate to me.
As a counter-recommendation: it hasn't got children, but over the summer I watched Inferno (1953), which as a survival story which also happens to be a film noir I enjoyed very much.
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Internet Archive! Enjoy!
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It's been like ten years and me and my BFF are STILL mad about the Game of Thrones finale.
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(I too am still mad about the Game of Thrones finale.)
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Re: Game of Thrones: So say we all.
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It's a 1929 novel by Richard Hughes about the mid-Victorian collision of some children with some pirates that doesn't play out anything like that summary sounds it should. It was reprinted by NYRB Books and it is deeply weird and I love it:
The inside of Laura was different indeed: something vast, complicated, and nebulous that can hardly be put into language. To take a metaphor from tadpoles, though legs were growing her gills had not yet dropped off. Being nearly four years old, she was certainly a child: and children are human (if one allows the term "human" a wide sense): but she had not altogether ceased to be a baby: and babies are of course not human—they are animals, and have a very ancient and ramified culture, as cats have, and fishes, and even snakes: the same in kind as these, but much more complicated and vivid, since babies are, after all, one of the most developed species of the lower vertebrates [. . .] Possibly a case might be made out that children are not human either: but I should not accept it. Agreed that their minds are not just more ignorant and stupider than ours, but differ in kind of thinking (are mad, in fact): but one can, by an effort of will and imagination, think like a child, at least in a partial degree—and even if one's success is infinitesimal it invalidates the case: while one can no more think like a baby, in the smallest respect, than one can think like a bee.
How then can one begin to describe the inside of Laura, where the child-mind lived in the midst of the familiar relics of the baby-mind, like a Fascist in Rome?
I also love the same author's In Hazard (1938), also a sea-story, much more of a collision with the elements, although the children of A High Wind in Jamaica are also pretty elemental, certainly more so than the pirates.
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(There's a downloadable copy available on the Internet Archive, though I'm not sure about the legality and it has some important pages missing, which is why I had gone to the library to get a copy.)
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Did you ever read the most proximate inspiration for LOTF, The Coral Island? Aside of being Victorian in its bigotries (ahahhahaahah), it's actually kind of entertaining as a kids' adventure story , or at least I found it so as a child when the British Male Exceptionalism went right over my head. A decade later I found out LOTF was based on it I was very entertained.
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I think I need to read The Mysterious Island right away!
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I'm not surprised -- seeing the description of the characters I knew how the one Black character would be portrayed but hey, Verne was trying. For his day it could have been much worse. (I'm pretty used to making those judgements, having been a bookish Black kid) I am prepared to enjoy the math and the Nemo. :)
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Enjoy!
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That it was, especially the second half where they wander around Polynesia being really racist, whee.
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Ralph experiences many facets of the island's culture: the popular sport of surfing, the sacrificing of babies to eel gods, rape, and cannibalism.
Baby sacrifice, cannibalism, and surfing: The new "arson, murder, and jaywalking?"
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I saw that these inhuman monsters were actually launching their canoe over the living bodies of their victims. But there was no pity in the breasts of these men. Forward they went in ruthless indifference, shouting as they went, while high above their voices rang the dying shrieks of those wretched creatures as, one after another, the ponderous canoe passed over them, burst the eyeballs from their sockets, and sent the life-blood gushing from their mouths.
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Happy Childhood Memories!
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Also, if it were just about growing up, why have Jinny’s choices toward the end make any difference at all? People don’t generally get to choose whether or not to grow up. (Is that what leaving on the boat is about—she tried to stay a child and you can’t, so she has to leave anyway? But why would that ruin things for everyone else? What choices, IRL, can a literal child make that will ruin the lives of a whole neighborhood and cause nature to encroach upon them? I am clearly not cut out for allegory.) At no point in this story does it sound like Jinny gets to make an informed choice because she (and, to some extent, everyone else on the island) has incomplete information.
…clearly I didn’t realize how grumpy I still was about this book. Thank you for your critique, so I could grumble alongside you! :)
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if the mystery isn’t getting explained, then maybe authors shouldn’t plant clues that lead nowhere.
Yes! I totally agree! I don't mind some mysteries going unsolved, but Abigail's letter is a very concrete clue that suggests that the mystery WILL get solved and the book IS more than just allegory, and then it just gets completely dropped.
Also, if it were just about growing up, why have Jinny’s choices toward the end make any difference at all? People don’t generally get to choose whether or not to grow up. (Is that what leaving on the boat is about—she tried to stay a child and you can’t, so she has to leave anyway? But why would that ruin things for everyone else? What choices, IRL, can a literal child make that will ruin the lives of a whole neighborhood and cause nature to encroach upon them?
Exactly! Allegories have to make sense on their own terms; the allegorical things have to match with their real-life counterparts.
For instance, there's a picture book allegory about growing up and not understanding it and having to do it anyway that I don't quite agree with but which does work as allegory, in my opinion.
The main character is a caterpillar who sees butterflies and keeps asking them what it's like to be a butterfly, and they just say, "Someday you'll know." The caterpillar is very annoyed and grumbles that when she becomes a butterfly, she'll tell the caterpillars all about it. She pupates and becomes a butterfly and sees a caterpillar yelling, "Hey! What's it like to be a butterfly?" And she realizes that the only thing she can say is "Someday you'll know."
Now, I partly agree that becoming an adult is kind of impossible to really explain to a child, because you have to experience it to really understand it. However, I think it's possible to at least try if a child wants to know. But the caterpillar/butterfly metaphor works for me, and the point does at least make sense.
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I 100% agree. If there are no answers and there will never be answers, okay, but certain things about the situation are concrete enough—Abigail’s books and letter, the boats sent by Someone coming from Somewhere—that it reads more like the author had an answer and just didn’t want to tell me. If the new kids just appeared in a certain grove and the oldest kid had to spend the night in said grove and would disappear by morning, I wouldn’t expect a rational explanation for that. (I’d still like one, but I wouldn’t expect one.)
Now, I partly agree that becoming an adult is kind of impossible to really explain to a child, because you have to experience it to really understand it. However, I think it's possible to at least try if a child wants to know. But the caterpillar/butterfly metaphor works for me, and the point does at least make sense.
Yes, this one does make sense to me! Not sure why this is the one that springs to mind, but did you ever read S.E. Hinton’s book The Puppy Sister? It’s about a puppy adopted by a family who wants to become a human so much that she magically begins to. If you take it as an allegory, it’s about how hard growth and change can be, and also how rewarding they can be. And it’s a satisfying story on its own. All I get from the end of Orphan Island is that adolescence/leaving childhood is terrible, which is a wild thing to tell kids!
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I have not read that book but it sounds really sweet.
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The next year, someone asked me what I was learning in abstract algebra, and I realized I couldn't explain it. I never had that experience in any other class, but the operative word here really is "abstract"! By the time you're several months into the class, you're so many layers of abstraction deep that the explanation goes, "In order to have this concept, you need this other concept, and in order for me to explain this other concept, I would first need to explain..." and at that point, you realize the person really didn't sign up for a multi-hour lecture, and then you say, "You'll understand if you take the class." At which point I mentally apologized to my quasi-boyfriend.
But yes, I agree with both your points. Becoming an adult is partially, though not completely, explainable!
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I mean there are definitely adults who would emphatically like pre-teens to fully internalize that lesson before teenagerhood, of various cultures, both faithful and atheist. And it seems like the problem (per the allegory) isn't Jinny going through menarche period, but rather going through menarche on the island - the island is only for children, neither for babies (arriving at toddler-age) nor those going thru puberty.
Like poking at it I think that in fact yeah, the allegory here is literally engaging with the idea that there are some seemingly Arbitrary Rules/Traditions that one must simply follow, as a child, or Terrible Things will happen, because tradition knows better than you and you're too ignorant to know or understand why.
That's a bullshit message that I definitely hate, but if you do assume that's what the author is engaging with, what you describe makes sense, within itself.
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What. the Fuck. Give me Baby Island!
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