Review of The Fisherman's Son
By Sharon Schulz-Elsing,
Contributing Editor of "Curled
Up With a Good Book"
Marilyn Peake's first fantasy
novel for young readers, The Fisherman's Son, calls to mind all the mystery and wonder of Orson Scott Card's earlier
mythological works such as Hart's Hope
or Seventh
Son in its
quest-style tale, and in its evocative descriptions of a place much like early
nineteenth-century Ireland comes close to the lush and luminous visual treatment
of John Sayles' magical film The Secret of Roan Innish.
Twelve-year-old Wiley O'Mara
lives in a poverty-stricken village plagued by a killer fever. When his gentle
and gracious mother succumbs to illness, and with his oft-absent father off on
an alcoholic binge, it falls to Wiley to make the journey to another village to
summon a priest to preside over his dead mother's wake and funeral. As simple as
the journey might seem, though, it will take him through a dark forest guarded
by a legendary three-eyed beast, and Wiley needs every ounce of shaky bravery
and by-need resources to make it through to the other side alive.
In the
forest, Wiley encounters not only the guardian beast but also a woman of glowing
beauty who gifts him with a golden cup and an enigmatic credo: Drink deeply by land or sea. Earth
comes only once.
After Wiley has returned to his lonely home on the ocean and his mother has been
buried, he follows the mysterious Lucinda's instructions to take the golden cup
to the ocean. What he finds is a path to the water's very depths, led by an old
dolphin with whom the cup allows him to share a mind-to-mind link. And what the
dolphin Elden has to show him is the millennia-old secret of his island's
origins, and the dangerous possibility of bringing that ancient legacy back to
its shores.
Although occasionally marred by infrequent contemporary
Americanisms in the dialogue (both the boy and his oceanic acquaintances are
wont to say "O.K."), on the whole this children's debut shines with fear,
wonder, triumph and loss. Few readers will be able to resist this tale of a
resourceful young boy left to his own determination by two very different kinds
of parental abandonment and who, through his own ability to move beyond the
things he fears, wins past hardship and terror.
Reviewed by Sharon Schulz-Elsing, Contributing Editor, "Curled Up With a Good Book".
Copyright (c) 2010 Marilyn Peake