It's been two months since his mother died in a car accident, and Ben's family is struggling to cope. His father sells their home and buys a sailboat, then takes his three sons out of school and embarks on a year-long sailing trip around the Bahamas. From the start, Ben's anger at his father, who has disrupted the boys' lives even further, is palpable. And now that the family is living aboard a 30-foot-long boat, he's impossible to avoid. Then one morning, Ben wakes up and his father is gone. Did he fall overboard? Commit suicide? Though Ben and his younger brothers can't agree on what happened to him, their arguments reveal volumes about the type of man they believe their father is. But The Great Wide Sea is much more than a book on father-son relationships; it's also an excellent tale of emotional and physical survival. Struggling to navigate the sea after losing their father, the boys encounter a storm and end up stranded on a tiny island with little food and no radio to call for help. The sailing and island scenes will keep you turning the pages, but the rich language, including the incorporation of poems by Emily Dickinson and Dylan Thomas into the text, will have you thinking about this book long after you finish reading. This is M. H. Herlong's first novel, and I'm excited to see what she comes up with next.
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