Stacpoole's island is the novel's greatest creation: lagoon, reef, storm, fruit, fish, seasons, and dangerous beauty form a world the stranded children learn without formal language for death, desire, pregnancy, or social taboo. The book's sensory clarity and long attention to practical survival explain its continuing narrative pull.
The book's sensory clarity and long attention to practical survival explain its continuing narrative pull.
Its central premise is also troubling. Richard and Emmeline are cousins who mature into a sexual relationship while isolated and poorly informed; the text romanticizes their innocence more readily than a modern reader can. Paddy's racial language, the portrayal of island peoples, and the rescue party's assumptions add colonial-era prejudice. The ending is strikingly ambiguous in perspective: the adults mistake the sleeping family for island natives even as Lestrange has finally found the children he sought.
